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BRYN MAWR NOTES 
AND MONOGRAPHS 
III 



THOMAS HARDY 

POET AND NOVELIST 



THOMAS HARDY 

POET AND NOVELIST 

By. A^ 

SAMUEL G. CHEW 

w 

Professor of English Literature 
in Bryn Mawr College 



Still nursing the unconquerable hope 




BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras 

1921 






Copyright, 1921, by 
BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 



OCT -7 '2 



g)aA624677 



POET AND NOVELIST 


V 


PREFACE 

A FEW paragraphs in the following Study 
are reprinted from an article, ''Homage to 
Thomas Hardy," published in The New 
Republic of June 2, 1920, on the occasion 
of Mr. Hardy's eightieth birthday. For 
permission to include them here thanks are 
due to the editors of that journal. 

The writer desires to express his grati- 
tude to Mr. Hardy for the permission, gen- 
erously accorded, to quote such passages 
from his writings as were necessary to 
illustrate the points made in this book. 
These passages are taken from the defini- 
tive Wessex Edition of the Novels and 
Poems, published by Macmillan and Com- 
pany. 

S. C. C. 

March, 1921. 




BRYN MAWR NOTES 


III 



vi THOMAS HARDY 



III BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. EARLY LIFE 1 

IL A SURVEY OF THE NOVELS ... 24 

III. SOME MATTERS OF TECHNIQUE AND 

STYLE 109 

IV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WESSEX 141 
V. MEN AND WOMEN: PEASANTS. . . 169 

VI. THE POEMS 191 

VII. "a TENTATIVE METAPHYSIC" . . 240 
NOTES . 255 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



Vll 



III 



Vlll 



THOMAS HARDY 



ni BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


1 


I 

EARLY LIFE 

In a remote, humble Dorsetshire cottage, 
on the border of Bockhampton Heath about 
three miles from Dorchester, Thomas 
Hardy was born on the second of June. 
1840. His father, like the father of Stephen 
Smith in A Pair of Blue Eyes, was a mason. 
The statement, still often met with, that 
Nelson's flag-captain was an ancestor of 
the novelist is incorrect; Captain Hardy 
belonged to another branch of the same 
stock. The Hardys are an old county 
family, formerly of importance but at the 
middle of the nineteenth century fallen in 
fortunes. Thomas Hardy has mentioned 
them frankly as analogous to the D'Urber- 
villes in their decline from great estate. 

From his mother Hardy received his 
earliest education, supplemented presently 
by the mediocre instruction afforded by the 


Birth 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



2 


THOMAS HARDY 


Impres- 
sions of 
Nature 

and of the 
Past 


Dorchester schools. The first impressions 
upon a mind unusually sensitive to sur- 
roundings were those of Nature and of the 
Past. Wandering over the heath before 
the cottage door, or through the woodland 
behind, beside the Froom and the Stour, 
within sound of the rushing weirs, among 
the apple-orchards and corn-fields, upon 
the lush, placid dairy-farms, in hamlets and 
larger villages, he observed not only the 
silence and the calm, but also the rivalry 
and the struggle of animal and vegetable 
life. The cruelty of Nature and her beauty 
impressed him deeply and the sense of 
this contradiction abides in his writings. 
All about him were memorials of the Past: 
Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Danish: venerable 
tracts of forest-land like the Chase in 
Tess, "where Druidical mistletoe was still 
found on aged oaks"; amphitheatre and 
round earth-work; tumulus and fortress; 
Druid-stones and strange, rude monoliths 
whose origins were shrouded in mystery 
and festooned with folk-traditions. As a 
youth he must have often climbed about 
the gigantic, grass-grown ruins of Mai Dun 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


3 


near Dorchester; and it was perhaps the 
very greatness of the effect upon his mind 
that hindered him from turning this enor- 
mous relic of antiquity to imaginative 
account, for save in one brief sketch no 
scene of his stories is laid in the fortress. 
Like the older inhabitants of Casterbridge 
of whom he has written, he too may have 
seen upon the slopes of the Roman amphi- 
theatre "a gazing legion of Hadrian's sol- 
diery as if watching the gladiatorial com- 
bat," a fleeting vision evoked by the in- 
tense imaginative appeal of the spot. And 
like his own Clym Yeobright, he must often 
have peopled the heaths with their ancient 
inhabitants. Like Clym, too, he picked 
up many a flint tool and arrow-head in the 
course of his wanderings. When, later in 
life, he built himself Max Gate, the house 
in which he still lives, the excavation for 
the foundations laid bare pottery and 
jewelry of times long past, and in prepar- 
ing a driveway workmen exhiuned the 
skeletons of five Roman legionaries. In a 
tender little poem Hardy has memorialized 
the maternal care that guided his stumbling 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



4 


THOMAS HARDY 


Folk- 
customs 


childish feet along the Roman Road — the 
Via that is trodden by so many of the 
characters in the Wessex novels. 

Thus life-long associations and age-long 
memorials have bound Hardy's individual 
existence to the long record of humanity. 
The very names of near-by places called 
up memories of ''the long drip of human 
tears" and it is among such reminders of 
past civilizations that he has spent his life. 
The peasantry of his youth-time had not 
yet learned to despise old ways and words. 
Then the molten image was still used to 
blast an enemy's life, and maidens still re- 
sorted to the woods of an Old Midsummer- 
Eve in quest of a vision of their future 
partners for life. Fortunately for those 
who reverence such records and customs 
Hardy's young manhood came at a time 
when it was still possible to observe in 
abundance and to store away in memory 
for future chronicling many folk-survivals 
that were soon to begin to fade out before 
the sophisticating influences that have 
crept into the South of England. The re- 
peal of the corn-laws, the introduction of 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


5 


railways, and later the enforcement of urii- 
fonn education have brought changes into 
Dorsetshire and even before the Great War 
old customs and traditions and landmarks 
and types were fast disappearing. What 
'•progress" had not entirely accomplished 
by 1914 the ruthlessness of military "ne- 
cessity" has of late, it would seem, thor- 
oughly performed, if we may judge by the 
fact that a recent pilgrim to Wessex found 
one of the heaths that served as a model 
for Egdon torn and scarred, the ancient 
ways defiled, the furze-bushes uprooted, 
and the barrows desecrated by multitudes 
of "tanks." 

Around the young Hardy were remind- 
ers of a more recent Past. Then Waterloo 
veterans were still to be met with. There 
were vivid recollections of the stirring days 
when "there were two arch-enemies of 
mankind — ^Satan as usual, and Buona- 
parte, who had sprung up and eclipsed his 
elder rival altogether." The threat of 
Napoleon's invasion left an impression 
upon the Channel counties in a way to 
which the Midlands and the North afford 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



6 


THOMAS HARDY 


Archi- 
tecture 


no parallel. Ruined huts on high points 
of land still marked the places where dwelt 
the beacon-keepers who should signal the 
landing of tlie French. The seeds that 
half a century later brought forth the mag- 
nificent literary fruitage of The Dynasts 
were sown in Hardy's mind in his child- 
hood. 

Other vestiges of the comparatively re- 
cent Past — Georgian residences, fragments 
of Elizabethan manor-houses, old inns, 
barns that had once been portions of old 
conventual groups, ruined abbeys, and a 
multitude of churches that were soon to 
undergo ''the tremendous practical joke" 
of restoration — must have helped to turn 
his mind towards the profession which at 
the age of sixteen he adopted and which 
left so marked an imprint upon his books. 
In 1856 Hardy entered the office of an 
architect named Hicks at Dorchester. It 
was the period of the English Gothic 
Renaissance. As a secondary result of the 
Tractarian Movement old churches, crum- 
bling and often crude enough, but interest- 
ing memorials of local faith and local art, 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



were being "battered past recognition in 
the turmoil of the so-called restoration." 
Like Ruskin, Hardy protests repeatedly in 
his books against this lack of reverence and 
good taste. The architect under whom he 
studied was commissioned to superintend 
a good deal of such reconstruction, and 
(like Stephen Smith) Hardy was sent to 
sketch and measure many such edifices be- 
fore their old, familiar lines disappeared 
forever. The frequent journeys that these 
tasks necessitated helped to familiarize him 
with the country-side. The study and 
practice of architecture gave to the author 
of the Wessex novels, it is not fanciful to 
say, his evident grasp of the essentials of 
proportion, design, finish, selection, and 
exactitude. The structural excellence of 
the plays of Sir John Vanbrugh affords a 
like instance of the influence of strict 
training in design upon a literary artist. 
More obvious traces of Hardy's early pro- 
fession are the detailed and at times too 
technical descriptions of thQ buildings in 
and around which his scenes are laid. 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



8 


THOMAS HARDY 


Literary 
studies 


Thence too comes, less happily, a crowd of 
similes and comparisons. 

These were years of study far beyond 
the boundaries of his chosen calling. There 
is evident self -portraiture in some of the 
characteristics of Clym Yeobright and 
Angel Clare, young men upon whose brows 
thought has too early set furrows; and 
there are suggestions of autobiography in 
that yearning for academic distinction that 
is part of the tragedy of Jude Fawley. 
But, more fortunate than the obscure so- 
journer in Christminster, Hardy found in 
Dorchester a companion a little older than 
himself and, it is said, of more regular edu- 
cation, with whom he pursued studies in the 
classical and modern literatures and in the- 
ology. The character of Knight in A Pair 
of Blue Eyes (the most autobiographical of 
all the novels) seems to be drawn from 
this fellow-student; and the aid and en- 
couragement afforded by him to Thomas 
Hardy is perhaps memorialized in the 
reverence and gratitude evinced for Knight 
by Stephen Smith. 

It is impossible to detennine the exact 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


9 


degree to which his studies of Greek Utera- 
ture influenced Hardy; but it is easy to see 
that from these studies comes the Sopho- 
clean tone of the greater novels, the power 
over Irony, the grasp of the principle of 
Total Effect, the ability to universalize 
the application of a contracted series of 
events. An intimate familiarity with the 
Bible, especially with the Old Testament, 
and of the several books, especially with 
Kings, Job, and Ecclesiastes , turned now 
to serious, now to humorous, purpose, per- 
vades Hardy's writings. Knowledge of pa- 
tristic literature and of modem theological 
disquisitions is evident in various places, 
especially in Jude the Obscure and in the 
extraordinary debate on baptism in A 
Laodicean (surely unique in romance among 
the methods whereby the hero comes to 
the aid of the damsel in distress). There 
is an oft-repeated anecdote of how Hardy 
about this time defended certain Anglican 
doctrines against strictures advanced by 
his unorthodox friends. Readings in Eng- 
lish poetry stored his mind with the allu- 
sions, at times apt, at times rather forced, 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



10 


THOMAS HARDY 




that recur constantly in the novels. With 
Wordsworth he had much in common and 
in Tennyson he must have found a sym- 
pathetic fellow -observer of the minutiae of 
the natural world; but the general trend 
of his thought led him far away from 
Browning, and the references to all three 
in the novels are uniformly disapproving in 
tone. Allusions to Swinburne occur con- 
stantly and it is evident that Poems and 
Ballads and Songs Before Sunrise were in- 
fluential in his intellectual growth. Hardy 
has himself admitted that the poetry of 
Crabbe helped suggest to him the choice of 
his subject-matter, but the outlook of the 
two men upon village and peasant life is in 
marked contrast. To Shelley go out 
Hardy's warmest tributes to an English 
poet; the Shelley an conception of Love is 
found, as we shall see, in two of the novels. 
A minor poet who revealed to Hardy the 
almost untouched literary possibilities of 
Dorsetshire was his fellow-townsman Wil- 
liam Barnes. After that poet's death 
Hardy published an obituary notice of him 
and many years later he edited a volume 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


11 


of selections from his verse, perhaps exag- 
gerating the merits of this dialect poetry. 
Many other English poets are referred to 
from time to time: Shakespeare, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, Herbert, Milton, Con- 
greve, James Thomson the First, Chatter- 
ton, Coleridge, Rossetti, Whitman — but 
without any particular significance attach- 
ing to the allusions. It is remarkable how 
free from literary traditions and schools 
Hardy's own verse is. The connection be- 
tween his own early poetry and James 
Thomson's ("B. V.'s"), and Swinburne's 
is rather the result of independent minds 
being affected by the same tendencies in 
thought than of any closer bond of influ- 
ence. There are, as has just been said, 
slight but definite connections with Crabbe 
and Barnes. But in so far as the literary 
ancestry of Hardy's poetry can be traced 
at all, the scant clues lead rather to the 
so-called metaphysical poets of the seven- 
teenth century than to any writer of his 
own day. 

* * * 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



12 


THOMAS HARDY 


London 

Knowledge 
of paint- 
ing 


In 1861 Hardy left Dorchester for the 
metropolis, there to study architecture un- 
der Sir Arthur Blomfield. While engaged 
in professional work he attended evening 
classes at King's College, thus rounding out 
his earUer, irregular education. In 1863 he 
won prizes for architectural theory and 
design from the Royal Institute of British 
Architects and from the Architectural As- 
sociation. He widened his acquaintance 
with the other arts and in particular gained 
the familiarity with painters of the most 
opposed schools which he uses for purposes 
of comparison and description, now clum- 
sily, now with amazing exactitude and 
felicity, throughout his writings. This 
matter is of sufficient importance to justify 
a brief digression. In his first published 
novel, for example, may be found descrip- 
tions such as these: 'A narrow, bony hand 
that would have been an unmitigated de- 
light to the pencil of Carlo Crivelli"; and: 
"The reflection from the smooth, stagnant 
surface tinged his face with the 'greenish 
shades of Correggio's nudes." Mr. Penny, 
in Under the Greenwood Tree, is likened to 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


13 


*'a framed portrait of a shoemaker by some 
modern Moroni." "The green lea," he 
writes in Tess, "was speckled as thickly 
with [cows] as a canvas by Van ALsloot or 
Sallaert with burghers." After his separa- 
tion from Tess, Clare's attitude towards life 
is set before us thus : 

Humanity stood before him no longer in 
the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but 
in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a 
Wiertz Museimi, and with the leer of a 
study by Van Beers. 

Among other artists whose works are al- 
luded to here or there are: Raphael, Ru- 
bens, Greuze, Guido Reni, Turner, Ter- 
burg, Gerard Douw, Danby, Nicholas 
Poussin, Flaxman, Ruysdael, Hobbema, 
Lely. Del Sarto, Spagnoletto, Sassoferrato, 
Reynolds, Carlo Dolci, and Sebastiano — 
the disregard of chronology in this list 
affording perhaps some faint indication of 
the wide range of Hardy's allusions. It is 
no mere parade of knowledge that Hardy 
offers, of course; rather it is an effort to 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



14 


THOMAS HARDY 


Disillusion 


present an exact pictorial description of per- 
sons and scenes; and as in the case of the 
crowd of similes drawn from architecture 
and from the world of nature, if he misses 
his mark, as occasionally he does, he falls 
into the awkward or the grotesque; but on 
the contrary, when successful, he brings 
home to the reader his scene or person with 
matchless vividness. 

A promising career as an architect was 
opening before him. But already he was 
hesitating, uncertain as to the wisdom of 
his choice of a profession. Beyond doubt 
he puts his own experience into the mouth 
of Edward Springrove, one of the architects 
in Desperate Remedies: 

Those who get rich [as architects] need 
have no skill at all as artists. — What need 
they have? — A certain kind of energy 
which men with any fondness for art 
possess very seldom indeed — an earnest- 
ness in making acquaintances, and a love 
for using them. They give their whole 
attention to the art of dining out, after 
mastering a few rudimentary facts to 
serve up in conversation. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Even before going up to London Hardy 
had begun to write verse and in London 
this occupation was continued. Again Hke 
Springrove, who was "a, poet himself in a 
small way," he despised the "pap-and- 
daisy school of verse" — the allusion is ob- 
vious. ''If anything on earth," Springrove 
remarks, ''ruins a man for useful occupa- 
tion, or for content with reasonable success 
in a profession or trade, it is the habit of 
writing verses." Fifty years later, in no 
such covert form. Hardy revealed the fact 
that he could find no publisher for the 
poems written during these years; and in 
current editions of Who^s Who will be 
found the significant statement that he 
"had to drop verse for prose about 1868." 
It is said that many of these poems were 
afterwards destroyed. The themes of 
some, rewritten in prose, found their way 
into Desperate Remedies. But a large num- 
ber of them, some in the form in which they 
originally stood, others revised, others 
built up from fragments and "old notes," 
have been given to the world during the 
last two decades. The quality of this 



15 



Early 
verse 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



16 



The New 
Science and 
the Old 
Religion 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



work can be judged not only from the por- 
tion that remains, but from a description of 
the verses of Robert Trewe, the poet who 
figures in the short story of ''An Imagina- 
tive Woman": 

He was a pessimist in so far as that char- 
acter applies to a man who looks at the 
worst contingencies as well as the best in 
the human condition. Being little at- 
tracted by excellences of form and 
rhythm apart from content, he some- 
times, when feeling outran his artistic 
speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely 
rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every 
right-minded reviewer said he ought not 
to have done. 

These sentences sum up, quaintly enough 
and with a characteristic tinge of irony, the 
characteristics of the writer's own early 
verse. 

This small body of thoughtful, sensitive 
and artistically immature poems exhibits 
the influence of the new forces which were 
changing the face of things in the sbcties, 
destroying an old world while the new was 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


17 


powerless to be bom, extending the life- 
history of mankind into "the dark back- 
ward and abysm of time," and peering out 
beyond what had once been the flaming 
ramparts of the world. The stronghold of 
orthodoxy was being assailed without and 
within. The Oxford meeting of the British 
Association and the publication of Essays 
and Reviews were events of the immediate 
past. The poetical atmosphere , among 
those who could not find refuge in a resur- 
gent Cyrenaicism, became charged with 
pessimism, at times melancholy, at times 
in despairing revolt. Arnold voiced such 
feelings in ''Dover Beach," and men found 
images of their own thoughts, cloaked in 
gorgeous Eastern drapery, in Fitzgerald's 
translation of Omar. In such a mood 
Swinburne inserted amid the earlier per- 
fervid erotics of "Anactoria" the passage 
of flaming indignation against the gods 
that gives moral significance to the poem, 
and in the same mood wrote the middle 
choruses of Atalanta in Calydon. It was of 
such spiritual experiences that W, K. Clif- 
ford wrote a little later: "We have seen 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



18 


THOMAS HARDY 


The effect 
of the con- 
flict upon 
Hardy 


the spring sun shine out of an empty- 
heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we 
have felt with utter loneliness that the 
Great Companion is dead." The despair 
of one such spirit is recorded in the ma- 
jestic rhetoric of The City of Dreadful 
Night. Similar feelings lend a new depth 
to Ruskin's prose, in the preface to The 
Crown of Wild Olive. In this welter of con- 
flicting purposes and ruined symbols some 
voices — Harriet Martineau's and George 
Eliot's, for example — were urging the sub- 
stitution for duty to a dimly descried or al- 
together unknown God the reHgion of hu- 
manity, the charity that "seeketh not her 
own." It was among these shaping influ- 
ences that Hardy began to write. 

Even in these early poems a preoccupa- 
tion with the mystery of the world is seen 
shadowing Hardy's thought with what 
Meredith later called his "twilight view of 
life." This mystery is confronted from the 
point of view of one who is wont to analyze 
his own sensations and ideas. From the 
known microcosm of the poet's individual- 
ity he looks out upon the macrocosm, the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


19 


Great Unknown. He finds no hint of or- 
derliness in the universe; no sign of direc- 
tion is apparent, no evidence of plan. 
Thus there begins the contrast, expressed 
so often in his writings, between the un- 
weening Cause and the individual human 
consciousness that has somehow been 
evolved in certain of the creatures of that 
Cause. Very impressive is his cry for a 
First Cause, even malign, in place of the 
purposelessness of ''crass Casualty." His 
is not the poetry of intellectual revolt like 
that of Swinburne; nor is his the merely 
puzzled and wandering mentality of such 
as Clough. Hardy has already reached a 
negative position, like that of James Thom- 
son, though in the occasional introduction 
of what looks like a malign fatalism there is 
evidence of repugnance to accept the evi- 
dence for mere determinism, a repugnance 
the more natural in a mind trained in such 
traditions of direction and plan as are 
given by architecture. One must note also 
that though the point of view is almost al- 
ways that of Leopardi and of ''B.V.^^^ sheer 
personal ill luck has no part in framing 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



20 


THOMAS HARDY 




Hardy's more generalized indictment of the 
world. And in this connection it may be 
said, once for all, that mere physical suffer- 
ing plays a small part in his novels and 
poetry. Moreover, in contrast to such men 
as Beddoes, who revel in what may be 
called literary pessimism, there are already 
meditations upon the pathos of unbelief. 
The gayer and more humorous poems of 
Hardy belong for the most part to a later 
period of his life. Here broodings upon 
death are constant. In 1867 the grimly 
grotesque piece "Heiress and Architect" 
was written. The dedicatory initials that 
follow the title of this poem suggest a per- 
sonal application, but back of any individ- 
ual experience there is certainly allegory; 
the heiress being a representative of hu- 
manity, full of hopes and ideals, and con- 
fronted by the architect, *'an arch-de- 
signer," who typifies the rigor and indif- 
ference of the universe. One by one, as 
she indicates now one plan and now an- 
other, he shatters her illusions, until she 
pleads at last for a ''narrow, winding tur- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


21 


ret," reaching to a loft where she may sit 
alone and grieve: 

"Such winding ways 
Fit not your days," 
Said he, the man of measuring eye; 
"I must even fashion as my rule declares, 
To wit: Give space (since life ends un- 
awares) 
To hale a coffined corpse adown the 
stairs; 

For you will die." 

The man who at the age of twenty-seven 
could write this strange meditation upon 
the Trionfo delta Morte must have cast off 
many illusions. In this and in many other 
poems there is a sense of le grand sommeil 
noir that enfolds the little waking moment 
called life. One feels in them a desolating 
consciousness of isolation — "Yes! in the sea 
of life enisled" — a consciousness of the 
impenetrable wall that shuts off individual 
from individual. The island of life is 
compassed about by the sea of oblivion, 
and in certain poems Hardy seems to cry 
with Leopardi: E il naufragar m^e dolce in 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



22 


THOMAS HARDY 




questo mare! In other poems temporary 
joy is found in love and friendship. But 
ever3rwhere there is a complete repudiation 
of the Carlylean remedy of action for 
despondency. Other poems still, for des- 
pair is wont to veil itself in cynicism, are 
jarring and disagreeable in tone, distrust- 
ful of humanity, sneering at its efforts and 
ideals in a manner out of accord with the 
essential sympathy and tenderness that, 
certain passages in the novels notwith- 
standing, are at the basis of Hardy's view 
of life. Many poems are studies in the 
freaks and pranks of the ''purblind Doom- 
sters" who mismanage human fate. In all 
one finds already a refusal, characteristic 
of all Hardy's writings, of false consolation 
and empty hope; a detennination to look 
at "the worst contingencies as well as the 
best in the human condition"; a deliberate 
and courageous posing of difficult questions. 
Here he differs from Clough and from the 
Arnold of the earlier years, who are grop- 
ing and perplexed, anxious to retain emo- 
tionally the ideas and hopes that they re- 
pudiate intellectually. And Hardy's lim- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


23 


itations are already as apparent as are his 
excellences. His steady view of life does 
not embrace the whole of life. It was not 
till towards the close of his career that he 
admitted (in the General Preface to the 
Wessex Edition of his works) that his has 
been a nature becoming vocal at tragedy 
rather than at comedy. "The truths of 
midnight," as James Thomson admitted 
to George Eliot, "do not necessarily ex- 
clude the truths of noon-day." But from 
these early poems there is no evidence to 
be drawn that, though undemonstrative be- 
fore a contrasting side of things, Hardy was 
not unperceiving. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



24 


THOMAS HARDY 


First 

experiment 
in fiction 


II 

A SURVEY OF THE NOVELS 

In 1865 Hardy published in Chambers' 
Journal his first short story: ''How I Built 
Myself a House." Here he employs in 
fiction for the first of many times his 
knowledge of architecture. He tells in hu- 
morous vein (suggesting the influence of 
Dickens) of the experience of a young 
couple who, dissatisfied with the villa in 
which they live, build a dwelling according 
to their own plans and specifications. In 
the course of its construction various im- 
provements are worked into the original 
plans, and when at last it is finished they 
are by no means satisfied with it. The 
passage in which the supposed narrator 
describes his dizziness as he stands on the 
high scaffolding of the half-built dwelling 
and the warnings of the carpenter lest he 
fall, anticipates the use made of the same 


III 


BRYN MAV^R NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



situation in the sensational accident at the 
beginning of Desperate Remedies. Not- 
withstanding the trivial humour of the story 
there is a duly subordinated suggestion of 
the futility of human efforts; the outcome 
of our plans rarely measures up to our ex- 
pectations. Very seldom in later stories 
and never in the novels does Hardy employ 
the first-person form of narrative here used. 
He has never reprinted this slight piece. 

The distractions of literary pursuits and 
an inability to stoop to meretricious means 
of gaining patrons must have strongly af- 
fected Hardy's attitude towards architec- 
ture during his last years in London. He 
came to despise "society" (in the narrow 
sense of the term). A misunderstanding 
that is out of accord with his usual toler- 
ance and sympathy towards humanity in 
general plays a part in this contempt. 
From his experiences in the social world are 
derived the feeble satiric sketches in the 
London portions of A Pair of Blue Eyes and 
the attempts, extraordinary only in their 
weakness, to portray that world in The 
Hand of Ethelherta, A Laodicean, Two on a 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



25 



He leaves 
London 



III 



26 


THOMAS HARDY 


The first 
novel 


Tower, and elsewhere. In 1867 he left 
London, settled at Weymouth, and began 
his first novel, while still practising his 
profession. 

The Poor Man and the Lady was sub- 
mitted to the publishing house of Chapman 
and Hall in May, 1869. Many years later 
Hardy himself described this story as an 
incoherent production full of revolutionary 
and anti-social theories. According to the 
well-known stor>% George Meredith, the 
publishers' reader, granted Hardy a per- 
sonal interview and advised him to with- 
draw the manuscript; but there is some 
reason to believe that it was rejected out- 
right. Forty years afterwards, when Mere- 
dith died, Hardy recalled the trenchant 
words, turning to kindness, of this inter- 
view. It is said that Meredith urged him 
to quit introspection and philosophizing in 
fiction and to try his hand at a novel of 
complicated intrigue. Hardy made no 
further effort to get The Poor Man and the 
Lady published. It is still in existence in 
manuscript. 1 

* * * 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



i 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Hardy followed Meredith's advice and, 
accepting frankly the code of the popular 
"sensation novelists" of the day, composed 
Desperate Remedies. There is no truth 
whatever in the statement quite recently 
reaffirmed^ that this book is a mere revision 
of his first rejected story. It is an entirely 
independent work of a quite different order. 
A companion error to the effect that this 
second novel was accepted on Meredith's 
recommendation is refutable by reference 
to any bibliography of Hardy. Desperate 
Remedies was published anonymously in 
1871 by the firm of Tinsley Brothers. 
Hardy himself had to finance the under- 
taking and advanced seventy-five pounds 
for that purpose.'' 

The writer of one monograph upon 
Hardy* puts Desperate Remedies aside as a 
sort of Titus Andronicus among the Wessex 
novels, unworthy of any consideration. 
This is quite uncritical. It is an immature 
and in some respects disagreeable book,» a 
tale of mystery, crime, startling coinci- 
dence, and melodramatic incident, which in 
its use of entanglement, suspense, and 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



27 



First 

published 

novel 



The 

disciple of 
Wilkie 
Collins and 
of Charles 
Reade 



III 



28 


THOMAS HARDY 


Anticipa- 
tions of the 
greater 
novels 


moral obliquity reveals the strong influence 
of Wilkie Collins. Its opening words de- 
scribe it as "a long and intricately in- 
wrought chain of circumstance." Sensa- 
tional incidents like the burning of the inn 
and the midnight burial indicate very defi- 
nitely the indebtedness to Charles Reade 
and Collins. This is seen also in the ever- 
present intention to ''keep the reader 
guessing," in the division of the events of 
the story according to periods of time, and 
in the written confession left by the villain 
of the piece, which turns up after his death. 
The portrayal of the brutal animalism of 
Manston's love for Cytherea is remarkably 
frank considering the date, and seems to 
follow the lead of Reade's Griffith Gaunt 
(1866) in its efforts to break through the 
conventions of Victorian prudery. 

But though obviously the work of an 
imitator, the book offers, both in structure 
and in character-drawing, certain adum- 
brations of some of the most typical traits 
of the later novels. Hardy gradually 
abandoned the employment of mystery and 
suspense in favor of the equally effective 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


29 


and perhaps more philosophical method of 
tragic anticipation; but these — not neces- 
sarily, but in Hardy's hands — cruder means 
of sustaining interest did not disappear im- 
mediately after Desperate Remedies. Al- 
ready he exhibits his ability to weave a 
highly complicated plot while keeping a 
sure grasp upon every strand of the tangle 
of purposes and interests. There is little 
in the character of the heroine, except her 
inability to stand firiii against external in- 
fluences, to suggest the type of woman later 
peculiarly associated with Hardy; she is 
franker, less indirect, less subtle, and on the 
whole more stable. She and Miss Ald- 
clyffe are immature studies in contrasting 
types of forcefulness and deHcacy. The 
illicit love-affair of Miss Aldclyflfe's youth 
is the first of many such incidents in the 
novels. Manston, her natural son, faintly 
suggests Hardy's most powerful study of a 
man in the grip of an oveiniastering passion 
— Boldwood. It is noteworthy that his 
temperament is in part accounted for by 
the circumstances of his birth. Contrasted 
with him is the less egoistical, more self- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



30 


THOMAS HARDY 




controlled Springrove. We have thus the 
beginnings of a theme to which Hardy often 
recurs: animal selfishness against self- 
sacrificing devotion matched in a struggle 
for the possession of a loved woman. The 
two scenes mentioned above indicate the 
possession of great strength in depicting 
startling incident. But there is no sweet- 
ness in the book, and subtlety only in 
those passages which are obviously mere 
transcriptions of early poems. Such para- 
phrases often take the form of disconnected 
aphorisms of a philosophic sort and in 
sombre vein, generally stiffly and awk- 
wardly expressed. But there is no large 
philosophic implication that raises the in- 
terest above the level attained by a merely 
ingenious plot. Beneath the conscien- 
tiously documented external "realism" of 
Budmouth and Knapwater House there is 
a thoroughgoing romanticism of treatment; 
and even the realism of setting is of a sort 
that Reade could produce any day from 
his scrap-books and pigeon-holes. In this 
respect Hardy had a long way to go before 
he became master of the art that is visible 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


31 


in the living presentation of Dorchester 
seen in The Mayor of Casterhridge. An ex- 
ception must be made, however, of the 
modest but convincing beginning of his 
transcripts of country life, in his reproduc- 
tion of the dialogue and characteristics of 
the peasantry. The occasional rustic 
scenes — the inn-keeper and his friends, the 
postman, and the bell-ringers — are not only 
promising but excellent in themselves. 

Though almost ignored by the public (a 
second edition was not called for until 
1889), Desperate Remedies obtained some 
qualified praise from the critics. Indecision 
was expressed with regard to the author's 
sex, the knowledge of female character 
seeming to denote a woman, "the occa- 
sional coarseness of expression" a man. 
The West Country characters were singled 
out as the best part of the book by judicious 
reviewers, one of whom declared them to 
be "almost worthy of George Eliot." 

This remark is the first appearance in 
print of an idea that has haunted critics of 
Thomas Hardy. Lately an entire book 
has been devoted to a comparison of him 


The 

appearance 
of the 
peasants 

Reception 
of the book 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



32 


THOMAS HARDY 


Digression: 
a compari- 
son of 
Hardy and 
George Eliot 


with George Eliot, the contrast there 
drawn being entirely in favor of the woman. 
But as a matter of fact the dissimilarities 
are far more marked than the resemblances. 
Each writer uses the novel as a medium for 
the communication of ideas, and in each 
the tendency to philosophize becomes more 
outspoken in later books. But the views 
of life that they set forth are poles asunder. 
The tragic conflict in George Eliot's con- 
ception is between desire and conscience; 
it is an internal war. Conscience plays a 
small part in Hardy's books. He envisages 
life as a struggle between will and destiny. 
Man is master of his fate in George Eliot; 
the problem is a moral one. Fate, accord- 
ing to Hardy, is beyond human control. 
The one preaches action and resistance; the 
other submission, quietism. In both writ- 
ers hereditary taints and the contamina- 
tions of environment play a part; but in 
George Eliot their influence is preponderat- 
ing, in Hardy they do not determine the 
outcome.^ Both introduce the rustics of 
their native counties into some of their 
novels, the yokels disappearing from 


III 


BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


33 


George Eliot's later fiction as they do from 
Jude the Obscure. Such peasant characters 
of equally remote districts are bound to 
possess in common many traits of manners 
and beliefs. But the older novelist's care- 
fully realistic studies of country life lack 
the lightness, relief, and flavour afforded by 
the undertone of quiet amusement which 
while it lessens the realism enhances the 
charm of Hardy's country scenes. Never- 
theless it may well be that observation of 
her success in delineating the peasantry of 
Warwickshire suggested to Hardy to turn 
to artistic account the customs and tradi- 
tions of the Southron folk among whom he 
had grown up and whom he best knew. 
Blackmore, too, whose Lorna Doone had 
appeared in 1869, may have helped to guide 
Hardy into Wessex. 

At all events it was this vein of his 
genius, and quite evidently following the 
lead of George Eliot, that he worked ex- 
clusively in his next story. Under the Green- 
wood Tree, which was published anony- 
mously in 1872. This is unpretentious in 
scale and theme and far removed from the 


"A rural 
painting in 
the Dutch 
School" 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



34 


THOMAS HARDY 




complexities of Desperate Remedies. It is 
an intimate, detailed, humorous and deli- 
cately ironical story of a rural courtship. 
Then and until long afterwards it required, 
as one of Hardy's characters remarks else- 
where, "a judicious omission of your real 
thoughts to make a novel popular"; and 
it would have been a shrewd critic who 
could have detected at the time the under- 
tone of bitterness in the portrayal of the 
indecision and deceptiveness of the win- 
some heroine, Fancy Day. It is, indeed, 
possible to exaggerate the significance of 
this undertone, for as a whole the tale is 
blithe enough.^ The simple love-story is 
set against a background of village life. 
The gloom of the early poems is put aside 
in the contemplation of these lives that ac- 
cept with serenity the countless links that 
bind them close to Nature. Never, save 
in Far from the Madding Crowd and in 
some of the Wessex scenes of The Dynasts, 
has Hardy surpassed the quaint humour of 
the rustic talk. The original title of the 
book (preserved as a subtitle in recent 
editions) was "The Mellstock Choir." 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


35 


This is appropriate, for the comedy of 
Fancy Day's love-affairs is interwoven 
with the problem confronting the rustics 
of how to forestall or at least postpone the 
introduction of an organ-player in the vil- 
lage church in place of the time-hallowed 
west-gallery choir and band. This innova- 
tion, seemingly so unimportant, is typical 
of the revolutionary influences that were 
creeping into Wessex from the outside 
world. The choir's visit of protest to the 
vicar is unforgettable in its sweet good- 
humour, verging upon, but never quite de- 
generating into, farce. No less excellent 
are such scenes as that of the Christmas 
"wake" and the dance (the first of many 
dances in the Wessex novels) at William 
Dewy's. The tale is not, and does not pre- 
tend to be, a great work of art. But the 
art, unpretentious as it is, is masterly; the 
charm, however homely, is inimitable; and 
there are more profound implications, per- 
haps, than appear on the surface. 

The first book to bear Hardy's name 
upon its title-page was A Pair of Blue Eyes 
(1873). The obvious immaturity of this 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



36 



The third 
novel: the 
period of 
apprentice- 
ship is 
drawing to 
a close 



The 

excessive 
use of 
coincidence 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



story has been admitted by its author. In 
the contrasting scenes of comedy and 
pathos there is evidence of the influence of 
Dickens, though the alternations are ac- 
complished with more dexterity and re- 
finement than the master was generally 
capable of. And too much of the influ- 
ence of Wilkie Collins still remains. Sen- 
sational events and coincidences are too 
frequently resorted to in order to sustain 
the interest. It is unnecessary to set down 
here a full list of these devices, but the use 
of coincidences which in their number 
stretch to the limit the reader's willing sus- 
pension of disbelief is so significant for 
Hardy's development and philosophy that 
some notable examples must be given. Mr. 
Swancourt chose the same day for his 
secret marriage that his daughter selected 
for hers. The one person whom Elfrida 
and Smith met on their return from London 
was the old woman whose hatred of El- 
frida made that meeting doubly unfor- 
tunate. Knight, the person who be- 
friended Smith, was the reviewer of El- 
frida's romance and was also the second 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


37 


Mrs. Swancourt's cousin. Elfrida found 
her missing ear-ring, looked for previously 
in vain, at precisely the most awkward 
moment possible. The church tower fell 
just after Elfrida had indicated it as the 
very symbol of steadfastness. Mrs. Jeth- 
way, Elfrida's enemy, was buried beneath 
its ruins. Knight and Smith, acting inde- 
pendently, returned to Devonshire by the 
same train that carried the body of their 
loved one. Chance is certainly over- 
worked, and the artist, several times barely 
escaping the farcical, has not sufficient 
mastery to render acceptable so formidable 
a conglomeration of its freaks. But one 
must bear in mind the part that "Hap" 
plays in Hardy's scheme of things and per- 
haps regard these strangely juxtaposed 
events as extreme illustrations of the whim- 
sicality of chance in disposing of human 
affairs. ''Hap" does not change char- 
acter; it alters the course of events. More- 
over, the long chain of disastrous circum- 
stances begins, not in chance, but in El- 
frida's moral cowardice, her inability to 
clear up and make straight at once a dis- 


and 

comments 

thereon 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



38 


THOMAS HARDY 


1 


agreeable situation. In this moral coward- 
ice Smith has his share. And we shall see 
later that it is in part responsible for the 
ruined lives of Tess and Jude. But in 
A Pair of Blue Eyes these shortcomings of 
character account only in part for the re- 
sulting tragedy. There are whims and 
aberrations of chance that are external to 
human character and irrespective of human 
effort. It is not merely in themselves that 
the personages of the story "are thus and 
thus"; the outcome is in part controlled 
by external circumstances, the meeting 
with Mrs. Jethway and the lost ear-ring for 
example. And, finally, it is not fantastic 
to suppose that Hardy's insistence upon 
the marvellous in coincidence is intended 
to take the place to some degree of the 
supernatural element of earlier fiction, 
Hardy's evident feeling for the supernat- 
ural being held in check by the rational- 
istic tendencies of his time. What he 
could do in the way of suggesting the super- 
natural, without yielding himself wholly 
to its fascination, may be seen in various 
later stories: in the short tale of *'The 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Withered Arm" and in certain episodes of 
The Return of the Native and The Mayor of 
Casterhridge. 

A Pair of Blue Eyes marks a distinct ad- 
vance upon the two former novels. There 
was no telling that the author of Desperate 
Remedies would ever accomplish anything 
of genuine worth; and Under the Green- 
wood Tree, for all its charm, promises only 
such things as The Trumpet-Major, some 
of the short stories, and the rustic scenes in 
other books. The philosophic implications 
of the present story, on the other hand, are 
harbingers of many of Hardy's most mature 
ideas. Human action is seen to be fettered 
by Cause on the one side and by Effect on 
the other. The human will, thinking it- 
self free, is nevertheless bound fast by the 
''purblind Doomsters" that unthinkingly 
ordain what is to be. The line of thought 
is similar to that of many of the early 
poems. The famous episode on the cliff 
when Elfrida saves Knight from a terrible 
death is the first full indication of Hardy's 
powers in swift, tense narrative. These 
powers of concentration upon essentials, 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



39 



The novel 
a distinct 
advance 
upon its 
predeces- 
sors 



III 



40 


THOMAS HARDY* 


The 
characters 


of proper grouping of details, of imparting 
to the reader that same dread of immense 
height which one finds in the familiar lines 
in King Lear, need only to be expended 
upon less melodramatic themes to be first- 
rate. Several of the characters are note- 
worthy. Elfrida Swancourt is a clearly de- 
fined study of the type of woman faintly 
outlined in the sketch of Fancy Day: 
perilously attractive (irony lurks beneath 
the apparently trivial title of the book), 
indecisive, intellectually quick but shallow, 
not heartless but frail, impatient of oppo- 
sition yet quite unable to face a situation 
determinedly. The creature of impulse, 
quick to respond to every wind of persua- 
sion, she yet possesses a certain definiteness 
of character that anticipates with varia- 
tions Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine of 
Hardy's next book. Smith, the young 
architect, is a sHghtly drawn boyish figure. 
But Knight, the journalist, is the first of 
several thoughtful men in the novels who 
imagine themselves to be emancipated and 
liberal-minded but who are more enmeshed 
by tradition and convention than they are 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


41 


aware. The footsteps of such men are 
dogged by tragedy. Clym Yeobright be- 
longs with this group; Angel Clare is the 
capital example of the type. Knight de- 
mands unsullied maidenliness in his bride; 
and when the indiscretions of Elfrida are 
revealed to him his cloudy ideal, veiling the 
light of her essential purity, obscures the 
circumstances in which she had been en- 
trapped. He leaves her. The story thus 
presents what Hardy later called "the ro- 
mantic stage of an idea" used again in Tess 
of the D'Urbervilles. 

A Pair of Blue Eyes takes the reader, in 
its setting, farther westward than do the 
other novels, to the wild country around 
**lone Camelford and Boscastle divine" 
which Swinburne has described in one of 
the most beautiful of his elegies. The 
carefully subordinated picture of the rus- 
tics gives a realism that the book might 
have lacked had it dealt only with the 
personages of a higher social stratum. One 
rustic scene, that in the church vault where 
the yokels are preparing for the burial of 
Lady Luxellian, is hardly to be matched in 


Setting 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



42 


THOMAS HARDY 


The auto- 
biograph- 
ical element 

• 


Hardy's writings for rich huiiiotir mingled 
with grimness. . William Worm, Mr. Swan- 
court's man-of -all-work, is the first (except 
poor Thomas Leaf) of the thin-witted, 
slack-limbed, wambling fellows that are 
pitied and patronized by their sturdier 
associates. 

At this late date, when all the circum- 
stances of Hardy's life are of interest to his 
admirers, it cannot be amiss to say frankly 
that some details of the courting of Elfrida 
by Stephen Smith are indubitably drawn 
from the writer's" own experiences. The 
heroine is fashioned in part, as we know on 
good authority, s from his future wife. Miss 
Emma Lavinia Gifford; the hero, like 
Hardy, is an architect and the son of a 
mason; and the background of the court- 
ship is, both in locality and social circum- 
stances, much like Hardy's own. A com- 
parison of the descriptions of the country 
in which the comedy and tragedy of El- 
frida's life and fate are played out and the 
reminiscences of the same landscape in the 
touching and curious poems written after 
the death of Hardy's first wife ("Poems of 


III 


BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


43 


1912-1913") will fully confirm this sup- 
position. 

What the novel lacks is just that quality 
that Hardy was later to possess to a degree 
equalled by no other English novelist: the 
ability to read into a series of happenings 
to a group of unimportant people in a re- 
mote district a universal application, a sug- 
gestion of the inescapable one-ness that en- 
folds all human affairs. The style, when 
it seeks to be urbane, is still often awk- 
ward and ungracious; sentiments intended 
to be of tragic import are generally merely 
harsh and bitter; the "strong" scenes 
sometimes overreach themselves and barely 
escape being ludicrous. But there is a 
sure command of his medium in the land- 
scape drawing and in the dealings with the 
peasantry. On the whole there is a relapse 
from the flexible and confident grasp of 
Under the Greenwood Tree; but it is a re- 
lapse that comes from essaying a more dif- 
ficult feat of the novelist's art. 

A Pair of Blue Eyes was the first of 
Hardy's novels to appear in serial form be- 
fore publication as a book. It appeared in 


Final 

judgement 
of A Pair 
of Blue 
Eyes 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



44 



Definite 
abandon- 
ment of 
architecture 



Popular 
acclaim 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



Tinsley^s Magazine between September, 
1872, and July, 1873. Thereafter each of 
the novels, though often not in final form, 
was published first in one magazine or an- 
other. The success of this story was suf- 
ficiently marked to warrant Hardy's aban- 
donment of architecture, and thenceforth 
he committed himself wholly to imaginative 
literature. 



An invitation from Leslie Stephen now 
resulted in the great popular success of Far 
from the Madding Crowd, which was pub- 
lished anonymously in the Cornhill during 
the whole of 1874. At the conclusion of 
its serial run it was issued in book-form 
with Hardy's name on the title-page. In 
the same year Hardy married Miss Gifford. 
He moved from Weymouth to Stour- 
minster-Newton, thence some years later 
to Wimborne, and finally in 1885 to the 
outskirts of Dorchester. 

In Far Jrom the Madding Crowd many 
sides of Hardy's genius are shown fully de- 
veloped. There are still flashily sensa- 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


45 


tional incidents such as Troy's exhibition 
to Bathsheba of his skill at the sword-exer- 
cise (a scene much in the manner of Charles 
Reade) and the same soldier's snatching of 
the note from his wife's hand at the fair. 
The structural mastery is by no means 
flawless, else would have been avoided so 
stale and out-worn a device for temporarily 
getting rid of a character as the supposed 
drowning of Troy while bathing. Nor is it 
typical of Hardy's art to leave a loose end 
ungathered up as he does in the incon- 
clusive confinement of Boldwood in an in- 
sane asylum ''during her Majesty's pleas- 
ure." Such flaws as these are commented 
upon with characteristic impudence in 
George Moore's Confessions of a Young 
Man. But the many excellences of the 
novel insured not only its immediate suc- 
cess (which carried with it the incon- 
venience of attaching to its author's name 
the reputation of being a first-rate story- 
teller, thereby obscuring for a generation 
his significance as a thinker) but its per- 
manent place among the classics of the 
English novel. These merits were espe- 


Period of 
master- 
craftsman- 
ship begins 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



46 


THOMAS HARDY 


Its many 
merits 


cially the variety and vivacity of the moods 
and interests; the power of devising a 
series of convincingly connected yet siir- 
prising situations ; the insight into char- 
acter, especially the character of a certain 
type — ^for Hardy always the preeminent 
type — of woman; the minutely detailed 
and sympathetic nature-description in 
which the interrelationship of man and the 
natural world is brought out with a force- 
fulness that revealed to many contempo- 
rary readers the significance of this con- 
nection in the author's view of life; and 
the passages of intensely vivid narrative 
such as the burning of the rick, the bring- 
ing home of Fanny's body, and the doings 
of the gargoyle during the rain-storm. In 
the picture of the shearing -supper — Oak 
piping on his flute while the shearers re- 
cline at their ease in the gathering twilight 
— a scene redolent of the bucoHc tradition 
of all ages, Hardy almost transcends his 
meditun and approximates to those effects 
of light and colour and composition that 
are accomplished by the sister-art of paint- 
ing. In no other book are his peasants 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



more delightful or their humour more fra- 
grant ; he has in great measure shaken off 
the too literary flavour, the suggestion of 
Shakespearean imitation, that to a certain 
degree harms the effectiveness of, say, the 
remarkable scene in the church- vault in 
.4 Pair of Blue Eyes. 

The pervading theme of Far from the 
Madding Crowd is one that is to reappear 
with slight variations and subtle shiftings 
of emphasis in two later books and of which 
reminiscences are found in others still. 
The motive is that of the contrast between 
self-seeking passion and faithful, unselfish 
devotion, controlling not only judgement 
but emotion (which is a harder matter). 
The latter type of love is embodied in the 
shepherd Gabriel Oak. Some readers may 
observe a certain hesitation in the initial 
conception of his character; the picture of 
Oak with which the book opens presents a 
peasant who is rather more of a hind, 
rather more of an uncouth yokel, than Oak 
turns out to be. But probably, though 
this is not made very clear, it was intended 
that the maturing influence of misprized 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



47 



Its theme 



Its 
characters 



III 



48 


THOMAS HARDY 




love and of financial ruin should be ac- 
cepted as effecting the contrast between 
the shepherd of the first chapters and the 
shepherd of Bathsheba's farm. Those 
critics are in error who declare that Oak's 
character is undifferentiated from that of 
Venn in The Return of the Native and that 
of Winterbome in The Woodlanders. There 
are points of difference. Oak is more 
masterful, more confident than Giles; from 
the very beginning of the tale the reader 
experiences an undefined feeling that he 
will be able to work through his difficulties 
and disappointments to contentment. And 
he is a less mysterious figure than Venn, 
without the almost mystic temperament 
that leads Venn to adopt his queer calling 
after disappointment in love and that 
makes him almost an incarnation of the 
spirit of Egdon Heath. But all three men, 
as well as John Loveday in The Trumpet- 
Major, are cast from the same mould. In 
contrast to Oak are two representatives of 
selfish passion: Troy, the romantic, fas- 
cinating trivialist, who has yet in him 
something not altogether ignoble; and the 


III 


BRYN MAW^R NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


49 


sombre, violent Boldwood, brooding, intro- 
spective, uncontrolled. These men are 
variants of the type that includes, with 
important individual differences, Wilde ve 
in The Return of the Native and Fitzpiers in 
The Woodlanders. Bathsheba Everdene is 
the best representative of Hardy's belief in 
a woman's inability to press steadily and 
independently towards the goal that she 
has set before her. Despite herself, Bath- 
sheba, with all her determination to man- 
age her estate for herself, is dependent 
upon Oak, and though impatient of minor 
conventions she is sobered and rendered 
discreet by calamity in the brief space of a 
few months. As a foil to her there is 
Troy's sweetheart Fanny, but the contrast 
is not so fully developed as is done in the 
case of the juxtaposed women in the two 


1 
17 


novels that have so much in common with 


T ( 


Var from the Madding Crowd. The story 
is really of the loves of three men of widely 
contrasting temperament for one woman. 
One should note that the apparently gay 
title veils as deep meaning as did the light 
name of the preceding book. "Along the 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



50 


THOMAS HARDY 


Hardy's 

fame 

assured 

The ebb 
and flow of 
genius 


cool, sequestered vale of life" as passionate 
natures may be encountered, as high trag- 
edies may be enacted as upon the highroads 
of the world. 

This book established Hardy's place 
among the foremost living novelists. In- 
deed a contemporary reviewer declared 
that certain characteristics of the book 
secured him "a high place among novelists 
of any age." He did not have to undergo 
any such disheartening experience as Mere- 
dith's of a laborious climb to recognition 
not attained until his last years. As a 
partial offset to this good fortune his pop- 
ularity entailed some lowering of 'his im- 
agination's ideals to meet the demands of 
a great body of magazine readers. 

* * * 

Comment has frequently been made 
upon the apparent fluctuations in Hardy's 
genius, which, instead of developing stead- 
ily from apprentice-work to masterpiece 
and thence to another masterpiece, has 
produced between novels of great strength 
and profundity other stories that already 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



the world would be forgetting but for their 
connection with the five or six books of 
acknowledged excellence. This ebb and 
flow is due to the need of replenishment and 
refreshment after the severe intellectual 
and spiritual strain demanded by the major 
novels, after each of which (with one 
exception) several years follow. The 
phenomenon is similar to that observed 
in the career of Joseph Conrad. Between 
Nostromo and Chance came two tales, one 
dealing with Russian, the other with Eng- 
lish, anarchistic plots, which must be 
judged comparative failures. Such mate- 
rial is as foreign to Conrad's true field as is 
The Hand of Ethelberta to Hardy's. To 
gain renewed strength by turning to other 
and lighter themes is a wiser course, how- 
ever, than to exhaust fecundity in the first 
rush of genius as Dickens so nearly did. 

The novel just named was published in 
1876. It has been suggested that the, to 
us, almost incomprehensible strictures that 
were passed at the time upon Hardy's 
studies of rustic life (concerning which 
more will be said in a later chapter) may 



51 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



A venture 
into 

Meredith's 
domain 



III 



52 


THOMAS HARDY 




have suggested the sudden change of sub- 
ject-matter. Hardy appears here to be 
venturing into the domain of George Mere- 
dith, just as Meredith, in Rhoda Fleming, 
grapples with a subject better suited to the 
genius of Hardy. Meredith might have 
done well with the theme of a low-born 
girl's attempt to establish herself in the 
situation thrust upon her by a marriage 
into ''high life" followed swiftly by pre- 
mature and almost penniless widowhood, 
and in so doing to found the fortunes of 
her father and his large family. But it did 
not suit Hardy. Some of the scenes are 
rather lively and the portraits of the 
resourceful heroine's sister and brother are 
attractive; but the high-born lords and 
l9,dies are quite wooden and are not con- 
vincing even as rough sketches seen from 
the point of view of the servants' hall. 
The story begins amusingly enough; but 
it soon drags and as a whole it is quite 
insignificant. 

* * * 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



The novel which in the opinion of many- 
critics is Hardy's most nearly perfect work 
of art as well as his most profound and 
least biassed study of human nature is The 
Return of the Native. This was published 
in 1878. Notwithstanding its admirable 
qualities it was not so well received as some 
of its forerunners, one reviewer even pro- 
nouncing it ''distinctly inferior to anything 
of his which we have yet read. ' ' The situa- 
tion presented is. that of Far from the Mad- 
ding Crowd with certain variations : a love- 
entanglement between three men and two 
women. Two of these persons — ^Eustacia 
and Wildeve — are highly complex natures, 
impulsive, passionate, selfish, but not with- 
out some qualities that in other circum- 
stances might have been turned to good; 
two others — Thomasin and Venn — are 
steady, simple, and courageous. The first 
two are at odds with life and in violent war 
with the conditions among which they are 
placed; the second two are steeped in, and 
in harmony with, their environment. One 
may well question the grim note which 
Hardy has lately, in the definitive edition 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



53 



The first of 
the four 
great novels 



The theme 
and the 
leading 
characters 



III 



54 


THOMAS HARDY 




of the book, appended, to the effect that 
only the exigencies of periodical publica- 
tion caused him to arrange an ending with 
the marriage of the two children of the 
heath and requesting readers of "an aus- 
tere artistic code" to imagine that Thom- 
asin remained a widow and that Venn dis- 
appeared from the country-side. A pro- 
test against the conventional "happy end- 
ing" was needed at the time and would 
have been wholesome. But to have ended 
this particular story in such a manned 
would have eliminated the catharsis, the 
cleansing of the passions, which is part of 
the function of tragedy. As the book 
stands, the implied lesson is effectively 
brought home by the destruction of the two 
rebels against circumstance in contrast to 
the serene content awarded those who sub- 
mitted themselves to circumstance. There 
is a greater emphasis than heretofore upon 
the power of environment over the fortunes 
of humanity. The novelist develops with 
full and confident strength the line of 
thought somewhat crudely adumbrated in 
A Pair of Blue Eyes, for the tale is a tragedy 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


55 


of the human will, believing itself free yet 
ceaselessly entangled and thwarted by ex- 
ternal forces. Egdon is the type of that 
Power that moves the world, a Power which 
is not inimical (for hostihty implies inten- 
tion, and intention consciousness) but in- 
different to man. In some later novels 
and in many poems Hard}'' tends to differ- 
entiate more completely between Nature 
— that is, the natural world — and the Will 
or Force which governs it as well as man. 
All phenomena come to be looked upon as 
fellow-sufferers with man under a con- 
scienceless and implacable despotism. 
. Clym Yeobright, "the Native/' though 
entangled in the meshes that drag Eustacia 
and Wildeve to destruction, stands in a 
different relation to his environment from 
that of the two rebels and of Venn and 
Thomasin. Education has guided his 
aspirations to a height above his oppor- 
tunities. Yet experience of the outer 
world, far from alienating him from the 
surroundings in which he has been brought 
up, has intensified his love of the heath. 
He is Hardy's most careful study of what 


The view of 

Nature 

Clym 
Yeobright 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



56 


THOMAS HARDY 


Eustacia 


he conceives to be the modern man, worn 
and saddened by thought. He is one who 
holds ''the view of Hfe as a thing to be put 
up with, replacing that zest for existence 
which was so intense in early civilizations." 
For "old-fashioned revelling in the general 
situation grows less and less possible as we 
uncover the defects of natural laws and see 
the quandary that man is in by their opera- 
tion." (In such remarks as these we see 
Hardy feeling his way cautiously towards 
an explicit statement of the view of life in- 
herent and implicit in the novels.) Yet 
Clym, too, when his aspirations become 
subdued to the possibilities of his position, 
is not, one imagines, positively unhappy; 
doubtless his work as an itinerant preacher 
brought him a fair degree of content. 

In Eustacia there is the conflict between 
stern, limited actualities and romantic 
imaginations. She is a more passionate 
Emma B ovary, far removed from the sor- 
didness of a provincial French town, yet 
looking towards the vulgarities of Paris for 
the romance to which she is blind in the 
great heath around her; satisfying (like 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


57 


Emma), or attempting to satisfy, this 
craving for romance in a commonplace 
amour. 

The Return of the Native reveals a deep 
and most moving love of the natural 
world, founded on the surest knowledge. 
The famous prelude-like opening is of 
course one of the most magnificent pieces 
of modern prose, reaching a level to which 
Hardy but seldom attains. The descrip- 
tion of the heath enfolded by the night 
gradually resolves itself into the human 
business of the story. And throughout the 
book, ever and anon, a curtain seems to 
lift behind the actors, and we catch glimpses 
of the heath, impassive and enduring amid 
the tragedy that is so intense for the actors 
therein and yet is so light when set in the 
balance against natural forces. 

^ ^ ^ 

After the concentration required in the 
creation of this great romance refreshment 
was found in writing several books of 
slighter build. The first of these is The 
Trumpet-Major, published in 1880. This 


The back- 
ground 

Three 

slighter 

novels 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



58 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

appearance 
of the 
Napoleonic 
theme 


tale is to be associated with JJyider the 
Greenwood Tree as a study of feminine in- 
decision between two lovers,, set against a 
background of rustic life. As a whole it 
has been very variously estimated. A 
temporarily enfeebled imagination is ex- 
hibited by the presence of several "stock" 
literary types; the miles gloriosus, the 
miser, the faithful soldier and the fickle 
sailor. These last two remind one of the 
"faithful friends" or "two noble kinsmen" 
of so much earlier literature. The story is 
the first large sign of Hardy's interest in 
the period of the Napoleonic Wars; he has 
himself said that it was the consciousness 
that he had here barely touched the fringes 
of the great theme that kept him contin- 
ually pondering upon it till at length it 
found full expression in The Dynasts. 
(The earliest notes for the epic-drama, it 
may be said here, date from the later 
seventies.) The Trumpet-Major is a re- 
markable resurrection of the life of a by- 
gone time of crisis; the atmosphere of the 
village and of the old mill, the tranquil 
setting against the background of war are 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIwST 



59 



accomplished with a pleasing, quiet art. 
Hardy here gives freer rein than usual to 
imagery, to description for its own sake, to 
racy dialogue that has little bearing upon 
the action. As a whole his books lack the 
quality of gusto; that quality is certainly 
present here. The story is too protracted, 
but it leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth, 
and in tone it is the sweetest and serenest 
of all the novels. 

The feminine flux of fancy portrayed in 
this book becomes the chief motive of A 
Laodicean (1881), by all odds the weakest 
of Hardy's books but in the consideration 
of which criticism is handicapped by the 
author's statement that it was in large part 
composed during convalescence from severe 
illness. The reappearance of a whole group 
of architects (absent from the novels since 
.4 Pair of Blue Eyes), with lengthy dis- 
quisitions upon the problems involved in 
the restoration of old buildings, together 
with a return to something of the technique 
of Desperate Remedies, points to a con- 
tinued abeyance of the imaginative powers. 
The opening scene of the baptism, pre- 



Feminine 
indecision 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



60 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

stellar 

gauge 


senting, in a fashion better than any de- 
tailed description could have done, the 
vacillating heroine, is excellently done and 
was probably written before the illness that 
forced the author to fulfil as best he might 
the contract for serial publication to which 
he had agreed. The involved love-story is 
not worth untangling. De Stancy is a 
conventional figure, and his revolting 
bastard is of a type associated with the 
"Gothic" novel. The only noteworthy 
motive in the book, apart from that of 
feminine indeterminateness, is the influx of 
modern ideas and methods into Wessex; 
Paula, the heroine, comes of new commer- 
cial stock, but she lives in an old castle that 
embodies or symbolizes the dignity and ro- 
mance and memories — and discomforts — 
of past times. 

A third slight and in some respects 
rather tiresome story. Two on a Tower 
(1882), is notable for the manner in which 
the human emotions are projected against 
a background of infinite space, for the 
young hero is an astronomer; and a "stellar 
gauge" is thus afforded whereby may be 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


61 


measured the infinitesimal insignificance of 
the actions and emotions of such apparent 
importance to the actors themselves. The 
function of Egdon Heath in an earlier novel 
is thus assumed here by the starry universe. 
The suggestion that it is a malign fatalism 
that conducts human affairs, just hinted at 
in previous books, is here marked; after 
Two on a Tower this idea, a relic of the an- 
thropomorphic notions of Hardy's boy- 
hood, yields place to a strict detenninism. 
The theme of an older woman's beauti- 
ful, unselfish and half-maternal devotion 
to a young lover is suggestive of Balzac, who 
would have developed it, perhaps, with 
greater profundity and certainly with more 
elaboration but hardly with greater deli- 
cacy. In some characters of earlier novels, 
especially in his portrait of Bathsheba 
Everdene, Hardy had indicated his sym- 
pathy with those who rebel against the 
lesser social conventions. Here this sym- 
pathy becomes outspoken and there appear 
definite attacks upon the restraint imposed 
by society upon the individual in a manner 
that points forward to Tess and Jnde. 


The theme 
suggestive 
of Balzac 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



62 


THOMAS HARDY 


Four fallow 
years 


These attacks inspired what Meredith in 
another connection once called /'the low 
growls of British prudery. "^ The grounds 
for unfavorable comment were what 
seemed to Victorian minds an over-frank- 
ness in the portrayal of sexual emotion and 
sexual relations, an apparent attack upon 
the sanctity of marriage, and a supposedly 
satiric intent in the portrait of the Bishop 
of Melchester. But there is no fighting 
quality in the book, no defiant hostility to 
society. The outlook upon life is tenderly 
meditative and melancholy. It lacks 
force. And there is a detachment from life 
that seems to envelop the actors in the 
story in a sort of nebulous haze, as though 
events were seen through gauze curtains, 
that suggests the manner of Pater in the 
Imaginary Portraits. 

* * * 

For four years now Hardy published 
nothing except an article on "The Dorset- 
shire Labourer" (1883) to which reference 
will be made in a later chapter, and the 
pretty but fantastic and unimportant 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


63 


Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid (also 
1883), a mere novelette which may be dis- 
missed with two remarks. The milkmaid's 
lover is a lime-burner; he recalls Venn, the 
reddleman, in the way in which his per- 
sonality has been subdued to what he works 
in. The landscape is evidently a prelim- 
inary study for the elaborately wrought 
representations of similar country-side in 
the middle part of Tess . . . .These fallow 
years were also in part occupied with the 
pleasant task of building Max Gate, the 
house on the outskirts of Dorchester to 
which the Hardys moved in 1885. Then 
came The Mayor of Casterhridge (1886), an 
astonishing rebirth of power in thought 
and art. 

Interest in this book is not divided over 
a group of four or five people all portrayed 
with about the same amount of detail, but 
is concentrated in a manner that antici- 
pates the technique of Tess and Jude upon 
a single man who represents, as Jude was 
later to represent still more harshly, the 
conflict of reason and impulse. The trag- 
edy of Henchard's life does not lie in com- 


Changes in 
technique 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



64 


THOMAS HARDY 


Character 
is Fate 

• 


binations of external circumstances, though 
they play their part. His environment 
casts no such blight upon his hopes as did 
Eustacia's upon hers. He carries his fate 
with him and had opposition arisen it 
would have worked itself out in much the 
same manner elsewhere as in Casterbridge. 
Character is Fate. Henchard's shrewd, 
proud, illiterate, forceful, generous, pas- 
sionate nature dashes itself to pieces 
against its own qualities. To the lines in 
Lear which Hardy cites in the preface to 
Tess: 

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the 

gods, 
They kilh us for their sport — 

the clear-sightedness of Henchard and his 
humility would have compelled the reply, 
from the same tragedy: 

The gods are just, and of our pleasant 

vices 
Make instruments to plague us. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


65 


For the outcome is as inevitable as if it had 
been Egdon Heath that he dashed himself 
against. Fortune does not favor him; but 
the directing Force of the universe uses his 
own pride and high temper and stubborn- 
ness to work his ruin, notwithstanding his 
many splendid qualities of heart and head. 
This conception reaches to the very heart 
of tragedy, and the belated humility of his 
last visit to his foster-daughter renders the 
tragedy more poignant still. The other 
characters are less strongly imagined, and 
intentionally so in order to throw the pic- 
ture of Henchard into high relief. The 
first Mrs. Henchard is afrail, pitiful shadow. 
Elizabeth-Jane, the sport of contending 
forces, wins happiness in the end through 
no effort of her own but as it were through 
the caprice of chance that awards indif- 
ferently caresses and blows to humanity. 
Lucetta is quite conventional and theat- 
rical, a sort of dejected Mariana awaiting 
in her grange in the Channel Islands the 
return of another than Angelo, and later 
behaving as Hardy's fickle women are wont 
to behave. Farfrae, Henchard's Scotch 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



66 


THOMAS HARDY 


Farfrae 


steward and presently his rival, is uncon- 
vincingly drawn. Hardy knows his South- 
ron; he does not know the Scot. But the 
idea behind the conception of Farfrae is an 
important one and connects The Mayor of 
Casterbridge with .4 Laodicean. When 
Farfrae takes charge of Henchard's busi- 
ness he introduces new and revolutionary 
methods into the conduct of affairs. As 
one of the townsmen remarks : 

" 'Twas verily Fortune sent him to 
Henchard. His accounts were like a 
bramblewood when Mr. Farfrae came. 
He used to reckon his sacks by chalk 
strokes all in a row like garden-palings, 
measure his ricks by stretching with his 
arms, weigh his trusses by a lift, judge 
his hay by a chaw, and settle the price 
with a curse. But now this young, ac- 
complished man does it all by ciphering 
and mensuration." 

In his Northern canniness and energy and 
accuracy, contrasting with the easy-going, 
tradition-ridden, unambitious ways of the 
Southern folk, he thus typifies the ingress 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


67 


of new methods and ideas into Wessex. 
With him the Modern comes and before 
him the Immemorial has to yield. 

In the impression that the novel makes 
of logical development, reserved strength, 
remorseless logic, artistic restraint, and 
control of materials there are found strong 
claims for regarding it as Hardy's most 
artistic achievement. One should mark 
such matters as the intimate but never ob- 
trusive picture of the people and customs 
of the market-town; the subtle distinctions 
of shading to indicate the relative impor- 
tance of the principal characters ; the grad- 
ual decline of Henchard's fortunes, arrested 
for a moment with an irony that makes the 
outcome all the more bitter; the impression 
given of inevitability, as in that fine use of 
tragic anticipation when it is quietly an- 
nounced that the years of Henchard's self- 
denying ordinance against liquor are al- 
most up. It would be difficult to find an 
incident that is out of place or that has not 
its share in the outcome. The whole is 
thoroughly thought out and finely com- 


Many 
regard The 
Mayor as 
Hardy's 
masterpiece 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



68 


THOMAS HARDY 


Reversion 
to earlier 
technique 

The 

characters 


posed. What it lacks is charm, sweetness, 
poetry. 

Two of these qualities, and something of 
bitter-sweetness as well, are present in the 
next novel, the most tender of all Hardy's 
books. The two phases of Hardy's period 
of master-craftsmanship overlap, for The 
Mayor of Casterhridge was quickly followed 
by a book that one is tempted to believe 
preceded it in conception, if not in compo- 
sition. The Woodlanders (1887) belongs in 
theme with Far from the Madding Crowd 
and, even more closely, with The Return of 
the Native. For a third time we are pre- 
sented with two contrasting pairs of men 
and women: Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond, 
Giles Winterborne and Marty South. 
Fitzpiers, the sensualist, has in him a cer- 
tain intellectual quality that raises him a 
stage above the position of Troy and Wild- 
eve and accounts in part for the merciful- 
ness of Hardy in leaving it at least an open 
question whether the experiences that he 
has undergone may not make his later life 
a not altogether useless one. Felice Char- 
mond is less elaborately portrayed than 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


69 


Eustacia Vye, less romantic, more worldly, 
more hardened, even more misplaced in the 
forest than is Eustacia on the heath. Giles 
and Marty are the counterparts of Venn 
and Thomasin with this difference, that 
whereas in the earlier story the tragedy in 
which the heath-dwellers are involved 
leaves them scarred but whole, the wood- 
landers are destroyed by the capricious 
destiny that spares the two principal causes 
of their ruin. Apart from these four peo- 
ple, yet intertwined in fortune with them, 
is Grace Melbury, a female counterpart of 
Clym Yeobright. Like Clym she has been 
raised by education above her surround- 
ings; like him this involves her in tragedy; 
like him, though with characteristic femi- 
nine indecision, she becomes subdued again 
to her native environment; unlike him, and 
like a woman, she turns back to the outer 
world. It is left to the chorus of rustics to 
speculate upon her possible chances of hap- 
piness elsewhere. Apart from its tran- 
scendent interest as a story, the significance 
of the book hes in the exquisitely observed 
and minutely recorded woodland scenes and 


Its 
significance 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



70 



Short 
stories 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



customs, in the sense now clearly implied 
that Nature and man are fellow-sufferers 
from the burden of life, in the overflowing 
sympathy apparent beneath the reticence 
of the account of Giles's death, in the 
pathetic figure of Marty South, and in the 
fact that here for the last time the novelist's 
"objectivity" is retained and his personal 
opinions kept austerely unexpressed. 



For several years past, ever since 1879, 
Hardy had been publishing short stories 
from time to time. Some of these were 
now collected in the volume called Wessex 
Tales (1888), which was followed by three 
other similar collections : .4 Group of Noble 
Dames (1890), Life's Little Ironies (1894), 
and A Changed Man (1913). In the defin- 
itive Wessex edition of Hardy's works 
there has been some rearrangement of these 
tales. Disregarding chronology for the 
moment, one may consider these four vol- 
umes together before going on to the last 
three novels. 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


71 


In its employment of the marvellous and 
the fantastic ]Vessex Tales harks back to 
Hardy's earlier years and is in striking 
contrast to Life's Little Ironies. Three 
stories are particularly memorable in this 
first set. These are "The Three Stran- 
gers," ''The Withered Arm," and ''The 
Distracted Preacher." The first two of 
these, and several others in the book, are 
studies in the freaks of coincidence. The 
well-known tale of "The Three Strangers," 
which has been successfully dramatized, 
narrates the extraordinary chance meeting 
of a hangman and his intended victim and 
the victim's brother at a shepherd's hut. 
It ma}^ well be taken as a model of what the 
short story should be. The setting is clear- 
cut, picturesque and in ironical contrast to 
the circumstance of the meeting; the situa- 
tion is deftly and rapidly outlined; the epi- 
sode proceeds swiftly to a sensational but 
logical climax, and then the stormy night 
shuts out the scene. The suppressed 
terror of the escaped thief; the uncon- 
scious cheerfulness and professional pride 
of the hangman; the dumbfounded dis- 


Three 

memorable 

tales 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



72 


THOMAS HARDY 




tress of the thief's brother— all are placed 
ironically against the background of the 
shepherd's Christening feast. "The With- 
ered Arm" tells of the chance simultaneous 
occurrence of a dreadful dream or hallu- 
cination of an incubus and of the beginning 
of a terrible disease. The coincidence is so 
tremendous that, though it can be ac- 
counted for rationally, it almost forces the 
acceptance of a supernatural explanation. 
It shows the degree to which the power to 
suggest mystery and dread may take the 
place, in a rationalistic age, of the down- 
right supernaturaHsm of an age of romance. 
Here the various elements of the tale — the 
vengeful spirit of the cast-off mistress who 
has turned witch, the deformity of the 
bride and her gradual alienation from her 
husband, the dreadful counsel offered her 
by the conjuror, and the husband's grow- 
ing, wistfiil remorse at his abandonment of 
his bastard son — are kept well apart until 
they are suddenly brought together in the 
overwhelming climax at the hangman's 
cottage. "The Distracted Preacher" is 
the product of a very different mood. It 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


73 


is a delightfully humorous story, the irony 
for once being put to the service of laughter. 
The setting reminds. one of the opening 
pages of Conrad and Hueffer's Romance. 
For the story is of a conscientious young 
preacher who becomes enamoured of a 
fascinating young widow engaged in the 
trade of smuggling liquor from France. 
Love leads his moral sense far astray, but 
he has his revenge, for in later years, when 
he has won her for his wife, the one-time 
smuggler writes edifying tracts against the 
shady occupation in which she had formerly 
been so expert. Here, as in The Trumpet- 
Major, Hardy makes use of material de- 
rived in very large part from the actual 
past of his country-side. 

Such material is again employed in .4 
Group of Noble Dames, a second collection 
of brief narratives published serially in 1890 
and in enlarged form in 1891. Nowhere 
else in his fiction, save in The Trumpet- 
Major, does Hardy rely to such an extent 
upon country records and current local 
traditions. The tales, as the title indi- 
cates, concern the fortunes and misfortunes 


Chronicles 
of Wessex 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



74 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 
frame- tale 


of various great ladies of Wessex. They 
are, as one would expect, a series of studies 
of feminine psychology, of women acting 
in immediate obedience to emotional im- 
pulse. All center in marital difficulties and 
entanglements. The first few end happily 
enough (the first of all romantically so); 
but as the book progresses the tone of the 
stories becomes more and more sombre and 
the last are tragic indeed. The stories are 
held together by a very channing variety 
of the "frame-tale," a device of long lit- 
erary ancestry which had never become 
obsolete, as Mrs. Gaskell's Round the Sofa 
can witness, and which has of late been 
used again in Mr. Hewlitt's New Canter- 
bury Tales. The Casterbridge antiquarian 
club is prevented from taking its annual 
walking-tour by a heavy storm, and to be- 
guile the rainy afternoon and evening one 
member after another relates a story of the 
neighborhood. The various narrators are 
not particularly individualized nor is there 
any obvious attempt to suit the several 
stories to their tellers. The touch is light 
and there is no pretence of psychological 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


75 


profundity or any effort to a broad and 
comprehensive view of life such as is found 
in the Decameron and in Chaucer. But, 
following these great models, there are 
brief interpolated discussions by the mem- 
bers of the club; and the change in the 
character of the tales as the afternoon 
wears on suggests a successful imitation of 
Boccaccio. The philosopher in Hardy is 
here in abeyance, but the craftsman is 
splendidly confident of his command over 
his materials. 

Another and even simpler form of the 
'' frame-tale" is used in the series of col- 
loquial sketches entitled ''A Few Crusted 
Characters" in Lifers Little Ironies. These 
sketches form a little masterpiece of ''re- 
gional" literature. In grace, delicacy, hu- 
mour, felicity of setting, and knowledge of 
the folk-background they recall Under the 
Greenwood Tree. People who associate 
Hardy overmuch with gloom shotild turn 
to these tales. 

The stories contained in Life's Little 
Ironies were written between 1889 and 
1893. They are of a more philosophical 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



76 


THOMAS HARDY 


The short 
story used 
for deeper 
purpose 


cast than are the earUer short tales. Most 
of them are further illustrations of the 
point of view set forth in The Mayor of 
Casterbridge, that "Character is Fate." 
The "irony" comes generally from no for- 
tuitous combination of external events but 
from the inherent qualities of the pro- 
tagonist. It shows the perversion of men's 
purposes and the destruction of their hap- 
piness by circumstance working through 
some innate weakness in the character of 
the individual upon whom the interest is 
centered or through the prejudices and 
timidity of some one else which block his 
plans and hinder him from setting to rights 
the little world in which he moves. "On 
the Western Circuit" and "For Con- 
science's Sake " illustrate this. In the very 
powerful tale of "A Tragedy of Two Ambi- 
tions " Hardy borrows the terrible theme of 
Gwendolen's refusal to throw a rope to the 
drowning Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. 
He justifies the borrowing, for the use that 
he makes of the idea in this story of the 
two ambitious curates whose aspirations are 
thwarted by their drunken father is mas- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


77 


terly. The teehnique of these stories is 
everywhere about the same : the protagon- 
ist is set in the midst of a situation outhned 
with swift, deft strokes; this situation works 
up rapidly to a climax; there is a crash, 
followed by a new adjustment of the com- 
ponent parts of the original situation. The 
bitterly ironic tone of almost all the tales 
connects this volume with the series of 
''Satires of Circtmistance " in verse, pub- 
lished twenty years afterwards. 

There is no such unity of tone in the 
miscellany called A Changed Man which 
contains little of importance. The tale 
which gives the general title to the book, 
like several others therein, is in a general 
way like the stories in Life's Little Ironies 
but less meritorious than they. "A Tryst 
at an Ancient Earthwork" is noteworthy 
as being almost the only place in his writ- 
ings where Hardy has made imaginative 
use of the gigantic ancient fortress of Mai 
Dun. ''Alicia's Diary" differs from all his 
other stories, except his first juvenile ex- 
periment, in being written, as the title in- 
dicates, in the first person. But the book 


A 

miscellany 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



78 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

implicit as 
opposed to 
the explicit 

Two 
manifestos 


as a whole must be regarded merely as a 
gathering together of the by-products of a 
great career. 

These four series of short stories best 
show the side of Hardy's genius that has 
been content to leave unexpressed the im- 
plications that reside in the arrangement of 
human affairs that he sets forth. There is 
no room for expansion, no opportunity for 
explicit comment. The artistic unity thus 
achieved is often of a high order. But 
there is loss as well as gain. 

* * * 

The first notes for Jude the Obscure were 
jotted down in 1887, and it cannot have 
been much later that Hardy began the 
composition of Tess of the D^Urhervilles. 
That he set about the writing of these 
books with a ftiU consciousness that they 
would occasion adverse comment and dis- 
turb many minds is seen by the fact that 
before Tess appeared he published two 
articles that are in the nature of mani- 
festos. These are: "The Profitable Read- 
ing of Fiction," published in The Forum 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


79 


(New York) in 1888; and "Candour in 
English Fiction/' which appeared in The 
New Review in 1890, the latter being part 
of a discussion to which Sir Walter Besant 
and Mrs. Lynn Linton also contributed 
articles. The greater part of Hardy's 
earlier essay is taken up with matters to 
which attention will be devoted in the 
next chapter; but two sentences quite 
evidently prepare the way for Tess : 

It is unfortunately quite possible to read 
the most elevating works of imagination 
in our own or any language, and, by fixing 
the regard on the wrong side of the sub- 
ject, to gather not a grain of wisdom 
from them, nay, sometimes positive 
harm. What author has not had his 
experience of such readers? — the men- 
tally and morally warped one of both 
sexes, who will, where practicable, so 
twist plain and obvious meanings as to 
see in an honest picture of human nature 
an attack on religion, morals, or institu- 
. tions. 

The later article is so direct as to make it 
certain that Hardy had in mind, in speak- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



80 


THOMAS HARDY 




ing so plainly, the novel he was about to 
send forth. He pleads for sincerity; the 
writer of fiction should have liberty to ex- 
press candidly the same opinions that are 
expressed everywhere in society. He 
should be allowed to give full weight to the 
passions. It should be recognized that 
some novelists write not for school-girls or 
for the circulating libraries but for adult 
thoughtful men and women. Within his 
sphere should be permitted to come mature 
and balanced consideration of such matters 
especially as the relation of man to woman, 
as the position of man in the universe, and 
as the problems of religious beliefs. Hardy 
is here evidently giving vent to his indigna- 
tion against those conventions of serial 
publication that necessitated the bowdler- 
ization of several of his novels when they 
appeared in the first magazine version. 
Equally obviously, he is contrasting his 
own purposes and ideals with those of, say, 
Sir Walter Besant and other writers of 
novels which (as the French book-lists have 
it) ''peuvent 6tre mis entre toutes les 
mains." 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


81 


Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the most widely 
read of all his books, was published in com- 
plete form (save for a passage accidently 
overlooked at the time and not incorpor- 
ated in the novel till 1912) in November, 
1891, several parts of the book having pre- 
viously appeared in magazines. A tale of 
calamity as old as human nature, or at any 
rate as old as social conventions, is told 
with tender and sympathetic sincerity. 
Hardy here follows in the footsteps of the 
various Victorians who with greater or less 
tact and assurance have told of seduction: 
one has in mind especially Dickens, George 
Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, and Meredith. 

Of one of his former books a critic of the 
time had remarked that Hardy '4ike a true 
artist, never attempts by any indication of 
his own preferences to bias his reader's 
judgment." In Tess Hardy abandons the 
''objectivity" that used to be described as 
"essential." He forsakes his impassivity; 
he has a thesis to propound, and he does so 
in a recriminating fashion. This is not to 
say that to employ the novel as a means of 
promulgating a writer's views is neces- 


The 

abandon- 
ment of 
objec- 
tivity 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



82 


THOMAS HARDY 




sarily and inherently wrong. But in so 
doing Hardy left behind him one of the 
characteristics of the earlier Wessex novels 
that was most impressive. The point of 
his development in lengthy fiction is 
reached where he is emerging from the im- 
plicit to the explicit in the illustration and 
expoundmg of his view of life. This change 
may well have been prompted by the recep- 
tion of former romances by a public that 
greeted him as a capital story-teller while 
refusing to recognize the sub-stratum of 
philosophic implication. The explanation 
suggests a comparison with Meredith's 
development in the face of public indiffer- 
ence. Therefore, though, as has just been 
said, Tess is Hardy's most widely known 
book, neither it nor Jude is really thor- 
oughly characteristic. The mysterious 
light which, like that which appears ever 
and anon in The Dynasts, is shed over the 
action of The Return of the Native or of 
The Woodlanders, giving an effect approx- 
imating that of the supernatural, has al- 
most disappeared. Hardy is more modern, 
more didactic, more realistic, less a part of 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


83 


the half -pagan primitive peasantry among 
whom he grew up — in a word, less Hardy. 
It is possible, by setting certain passages 
in Tess over against certain others, to in- 
volve Hardy in a maze of self-contradic- 
tions. Nature is depicted at times as cruel 
and without sympathy; yet there are re- 
peated suggestions of advocacy of the free 
play of natural impulses. The very 
measures that have been taken for the 
protection of society against the merciless- 
ness of Nature are harshly attacked. And 
this attack is in itself an admission (which 
Hardy has elsewhere indicated as the 
centre of his practical philosophy) that man 
can ameliorate the conditions in which he 
lives. Yet man is not a free agent. It is 
possible so to follow Tess's career — and in 
fact the Spectator's reviewer at the time did 
so — as to make her out very largely the 
victim of her own stupidity and needless 
timidity. But these very qualities are 
part of her nature and beyond her control. 
Other critics have denounced the execution 
of Tess as an impossible extravagance. 
This, however, is to forget the severity of 


The 

impression 
of inco- 
herence 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



84 


THOMAS HARDY 


Hardy's 

optimism 


the penal code as it existed of recent years 
in England; one may compare the exaction 
of death for sheep-stealing in "The Three 
Strangers." Other episodes can be picked 
out in which the writer seems to lose his 
self-control, the capital instance being the 
sketch of the vicar who refuses burial for 
Tess's baby in consecrated ground. In 
general an effect of incoherence is produced 
by the indiscriminate blows rained now 
upon ephemeral remediable wrongs, now 
upon the very nature of things. 

And yet, when all is said, the impression 
that Tess leaves upon almost every candid 
and clear-sighted reader is one of power and 
insight and sympathy and beauty — and 
hopefulness. The conclusion we are asked 
to draw is that passivity, quietism, is the 
only remedy for the ills of human life. But 
we do nothing of the sort. We deny that 
the book presents any general indictment 
of life. For these evils are not inherent in 
the nature of things. They are open to 
cure. Already, in the three decades that 
have passed since Tess appeared, sentiment 
has made some progress. And the world 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


85 


is not altogether wrong that has in it such 
a place as Talbothay's dairy, and a woman 
of such native loveliness of character as 
Tess, and, indeed, a man of such qualities 
as he who tells her story. If at times the 
presentation of some episodes is not con- 
vincing, the presentation of other episodes 
is profoundly so. It is difficult to accept 
as in keeping with Tess's character the first 
sojourn with Alec following the night in the 
Chase. In spite of his emphasis upon her 
innocent and unsuspecting adolescence, 
Hardy fails to give a convincing analysis 
of the motives and impulses that drew her 
to Alec. But note, as one of the many off- 
sets to this, the exquisite art with which the 
passionate love of the dairy-maids for Angel 
Clare is kept from slipping over either into 
the maudlin on one side or the farcical on 
the other. The character-drawing is gen- 
erally of a high order, the chief exceptions 
being the two brothers of Angel Clare and 
Tess's father and young sister. Alec 
D'Urberville is portrayed in really mas- 
terly fashion. He is the arch -sensualist of 
the novels, without Troy's remorse, or 


The 

characters 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



86 


THOMAS HARDY 


especially 
Alec 


Fitzpiers's intellectuality, or Wildeve's 
courageous last moments. The subtle way 
in which his conversion is ascribed to a 
slight shift of point of view under the in- 
fluence of the same sensual temperament, 
is perhaps Hardy's finest achievement in 
psychological analysis, however much of 
suggestion it may owe to a passage in 
Madame Bovary: 

It was less a reform than a transfigura- 
tion. The former curves of sensuous- 
ness were now modulated to lines of de- 
votional passion. The lip-shapes that 
had meant seductiveness were now made 
to express supplication; the glow on the 
cheek that yesterday could be translated 
as riotousness was evangelized to-day 
into the splendour of pious rhetoric; 
animalism had become fanaticism; Pag- 
anism Paulinism; the bold rolling eye 
that had flashed upon her form in the old 
time with such mastery now beamed 
with the rude energy of a theolatry that 
was almost ferocious. ^ - 

Equally subtle — and a more diffictilt task — 
is the delineation of Angel Clare. His 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



nearest analogue in the novels is, of course, 
Knight in A Fair of Blue Eyes, but he be- 
longs with all those men who have par- 
tially shaken off the tyranny of convention 
and yet, while fancying themselves intel- 
lectually free, are bound faster than they 
realize by the conventions which they pride 
themselves upon having put by. The 
much-criticized episode of Clare's sugges- 
tion to Izz to accompany him to Brazil is 
in reality thoroughly in character. The 
suggestion comes in a moment of revolt 
against those conventions obedience to 
which has ruined his life. It is sudden, 
not reasoned; and it is checked in a mo- 
ment by the return of thought. His is a 
limed soul that, struggling to be free, is but 
the more engaged. He is thus portrayed 
and the function of admiration or con- 
demnation is left to the critics, who have 
accordingly divided, Mr. Abercrombie, for 
example, repudiating him utterly while 
Mr. Duffin writes of "the celestial beauty" 
of his character. If, bearing in mind that 
he refused to extend to Tess the very for- 
giveness that he asked of her and received 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



87 



and 

Angel Clare 



III 



88 


THOMAS HARDY 


Other 
comments 

"Poor 

wounded 

name!" 


— Knight at least exacted of Elfrida only 
what he was ready and able to offer her — 
one is inclined to exclaim of Clare, Guar da e 
passa! it must be remembered that Hardy 
himself does not pass judgement on him. 
Of the other characters it is not neces- 
sary to speak here; something will be said 
later of the elder Mr. Clare. Nor is it 
necessary to comment in detail upon the 
very beautiful descriptions of Nature, the 
Wessex background, particularly of the 
Chase, of the life on the great dairy-farms, 
and of Stonehenge. In some of the earlier 
books place and season had been to some 
extent fitted into accord with the action of 
the story. In Tess this adjustment is 
managed with the highest art. But con- 
sideration of this matter also is postponed 
for the present. When all these merits of 
character-drawing and nature-description 
and artistic construction have been recog- 
nized, the final appeal of the novel is never- 
theless not one of thought or of art but of 
feeling. The memory of Tess that abides, 
one dares say, in the mind of nearly every 
reader, is of Hardy's tenderness. 


Ill 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


89 


Along with the great popular success of 
Tess (which was reinforced when it was 
promptly turned into a play) went, as is 
still well remembered, a clamour from those 
whom prudery or conventionality or tim- 
idity rendered unfit to comprehend its pur- 
pose. In an addition to the original pref- 
ace Hardy divulged his sensitiveness to 
these criticisms. Another and more nat- 
ural accompaniment of its success was the 
appearance of two critical studies of 
Hardy's works: Lionel Johnson's The Art 
of Thomas Hardy (1894) and Annie Mac- 
donell's Thomas Hardy (1895). The former 
book, now long out of print, is a carefully 
wrought, elaborate, Pateresque, perhaps 
over "literary" monograph by a man of 
delicate sensibilities, whose catholic sym- 
pathies in literature enable him to rise 
above the fundamental philosophic differ- 
ences that divide him from Hardy. The 
latter book is an unpretentious and popular 
presentation of certain phases of Hardy's 
work. It is noteworthy that so late as 1895 
Miss Macdonell could summarize Hardy's 
claims to recognition as '^ story-teller, pic- 


Mono- 
graphs on 
Hardy 
begin to 
appear 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



90 



A Platonic 
fantasy 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



ture-maker, humorist," directly denying 
him any special gifts as poet or thinker. It 
was just this reputation that for so long re- 
tarded the comprehension of his thought 
and that prepared the way for the outcry 
raised by Jude the Obscure. 



The Well-Beloved, originally called The 
Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, appeared seri- 
ally in 1892 though it was not put into 
book-form until 1897. It marks another 
of those periods of re-creation that we have 
observed several times before. The theme 
is Shelleyan: 

In many mortal forms I rashly sought 
The shadow of that idol of my thought. 

The possibilities of this theme had been 
suggested in the character of Fitzpiers in 
The Woodlanders. ''Human love," says 
Fitzpiers, ''is a subjective thing. ... It 
is joy accompanied by an idea which we 
project against any suitable object." And 
again, at the first sight of Grace, his thought 
takes this turn: "Nature has at last re- 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


91 


covered her lost union with the Idea." In 
more than one poem Hardy recurs to this 
subject, particularly in that phase of the 
experience when the light of the Idea is 
vanishing from the face and form which it 
had previously illumined and which is then 
found to be as commonplace as any other. 
In The Well-Beloved this theme, which lies 
back of Fitzpiers's amatory flittings from 
Grace to Sue and to Mrs. Charmond, and 
to who knows whom in later unrecounted 
phases of his history, is worked out in in- 
genious but, before the end, wearisome de- 
tail in the story of Jocelyn Pierston as he 
pursues la Jiglia della sua mente, I- amoroso 
idea, the only true well-beloved, from mo- 
mentary incarnation to incarnation, as it 
lends its divine light now to some woman of 
society, now to a peasant girl, and as it 
dwells more persistently in the persons of 
the three Avices — grandmother, mother, 
and child — whom the disciple of the Vita 
Nuova and Epipsychidion has loved in 
youth, in manhood, and in old age. The 
conception of Pierston as a sculptor has 
meaning in it, for his art is only another 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



92 


THOMAS HARDY 




phase of the same pursuit. The mention 
of the Vita Nuova suggests perhaps a false 
analogy, for in Dante's experience love has 
been roused by the image of perfection and 
can never forsake its object; in Pierston's 
life it is roused again and again only by the 
hope, destined ever to disappointment, that 
perfection will be found in one or another 
of the succeeding objects of his desire. 
Shelley goes farther yet, for he loves the 
Idea which, as he is well aware, will quit 
each separate incarnation in turn. The 
Well-Beloved plays cleverly with a subtle 
theme, but it would have gained, not lost, 
had Hardy discarded the unconvincing at- 
tempt to account in part for Pierston's 
temperament by the peculiar and isolated 
environment of his youth. Nor does his 
marriage with a faded woman of the world 
whom long since the Idea had temporarily 
transfigured in his imagination help mat- 
ters. Irony is out of accord with fantasy. 
But the fantasticality and dullness (in- 
which the lack of any variety of interest 
plays a great part) must not blind the 
reader to the book's significance in the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



history of Hardy's development. In any 
later novel one must expect a sub-stratum 
of allegory. 



Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, 
parts of it having already appeared serially. 
To attempt to appraise it is a difficult task. 
It has been ridiculed; it has been seriously 
controverted; it has been indulgently re- 
garded as an unfortunate blunder on the 
part of a once-great artist; it has been 
called ''one of the most illustrious things in 
literature." This much may be safely 
said, that the judgement of posterity upon 
it will be partly determined in accordance 
with whether the novelist's function is held 
to be the impartial and impassive reflection 
of life or whether he may take as his mission 
the promulgation of new and important 
ideas. By the old test, the test of ''objec- 
tivity," Jude fails to a degree greater even 
than does Tess, for though there are no 
such philosophic digressions as occur in 
Tess, the novelist is here even farther re- 
moved from austere self-control. By the 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



93 



The last 
novel 



III 



94 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

technique 
of Jude 


other test it may be regarded as a milestone 
of advance, for it opens up new avenues of 
thought, it poses dehberately and cour- 
ageously questions that all the world now 
faces. It caused a storm of protest on its 
appearance. Not the least insult that was 
heaped upon its writer was the classing of 
him with Grant Allen as a member of ''the 
anti-marriage league" (the phrase is Mrs. 
Oliphant's). This hostility has persisted, 
and within the last couple of years a writer 
who claims to be a historian of the English 
novel has spoken of the " Hardy-Caine " 
school of fiction, a bracketing that needs no 
comment. The only permanent harm that 
the onslaught did was that, as Hardy has 
definitely stated, the experience completely 
cured him of any further interest in novel- 
writing. 

Structurally Jude belongs mid-way be- 
tween The Woodlanders and The Return of 
the Native on the one hand, and The Mayor 
of Casterhridge and Tess on the other. Like 
the latter books, it concentrates attention 
upon one leading figure; yet, as in the 
former books, there is a complex situation 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



arising out of the love-life of four closely 
allied people: two men and two women. 
A certain stiffening of the imagination is 
apparent in the repetition of situations 
from the earlier novels. This repetition is 
of another sort from that seen in Tess 
which reworks in a graver, more mature, 
more realistic way the leading motive of 
A Pair of Blue Eyes. In J tide the repeti- 
tions seem to be unconsciously done. The 
relationship of Jude and Phillotson is 
analogous to that of Smith and Knight. 
The grim story of Jude's forbears recalls the 
legend of the D'Urberville coach. Jude is 
reluctant to tell Sue of his connection with 
Arabella just as Tess makes repeated and 
half-hearted efforts to acquaint Clare with 
her history. Arabella turns up (by a 
coincidence that strains probabihty to the 
limit) at the crisis of Jude's fate like Alec 
at the time of Tess's abandonment. Jude 
returns to Arabella as Tess had returned to 
Alec. In Tess herself there had been 
something of the precocious pessimism that 
is exaggerated in Jude's son to the point of 
caricature. The unity of place — certainly 



95 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



96 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

tragedy of 
unrealized 
aims 


no sine qua non but magnificently adhered 
to in the novels of the middle years — is 
discarded more completely than in Tess and 
without the counterbalancing advantage 
there seen of harmonizing the event with 
the place in which it occurs. 

There is far more matter in Jude than 
can possibly be condensed into a paragraph 
or two, more perhaps, as Hardy confesses, 
than the novelist consciously put there. 
But it is possible to indicate very briefly 
some of the lines of thought. The central 
theme is "the tragedy of unrealized aims." 
This had been the motive of many of the 
tales in Life's Little Ironies. Here we are 
presented with a man who is well-meaning 
and who holds a high ideal before him. 
But he comes of tainted stock, he is of low 
birth and narrow circumstances, and he is 
constantly being dragged down by his tem- 
perament. In the very hour of his visions 
of Christminster, the "City of Light," 
seen now in his dreams, now in reality far 
off at sunset, there rushes upon him an ir- 
resistible inclination towards women and 
presently he is entrapped into a sordid 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


97 


marriage. Jude experiences to the full 
''the fret and fever, derision and disaster, 
that may press in the wake of the strongest 
passion known to humanity";^" and behind 
the temptation of sexual passion lurks an- 
other: the desire for strong liquor. Some 
hostile reviewers charged Hardy with put- 
ting to the credit of this man every as- 
piration, every fine yearning, and to the 
blame of circumstance each backsliding, 
each error, each yielding to desire. The 
charge misses the point of the whole trag- 
edy: the book is not a denial of the exist- 
ence of those happy souls who rise above 
temptations to the realizations of their 
ideals. It is the story of a man who (in 
Burns 's most pathetic self -condemnatory 
words) is "a poor, damned, incautious, 
duped, unfortunate fool, the sport, the 
miserable victim of . . . hypochondriac 
imaginations, agonizing sensibility, and 
bedlam passions." 

The wearisomely repeated attacks upon 
the permanency of the marriage bond are 
of secondary importance, for the handicap 
of an unwise union is merely the instru- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



98 



The Will- 
to-Live 
and the 

wm-Not. 

to-Live 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



ment of circumstance for thwarting Jude's 
aspiring desires. But the special prom- 
inence of the marital relation in this book 
can be connected closely with the philo- 
sophic systems of Schopenhauer and Von 
Hartmann (of which something more must 
be said later). As they watch a newly 
married couple Jude says to Sue: 

''We are a little beforehand, that's all. 
In fifty, a hundred years the descendants 
of these two will act and feel worse than 
we. They will see weltering humanity 
still more vividly than we do now, as 
'shapes like our own selves hideously 
multiplied,' and will be afraid to repro- 
duce them." 

One is reminded of Schopenhauer's famous 
and terrible indictment of lovers as 
"traitors to the race." For beneath the 
harsh realism of the story there is evi- 
dently allegory. The Will-Not-to-Exist is 
on the increase. The Intellect (which 
realizes the uselessness of life) is encroach- 
ing upon the domain of the Heart (which 
contains the instinct of reproduction). In 



BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


99 


Jude, the male, the rational element is 
more highly developed, though it is ever 
and anon dragged down by the body. 
Arabella, on the other hand, is the very 
embodiment of Schopenhauer's view of 
woman as set forth in the famous essay. 
She is the mere instrument of the Will-to- 
Live. Sue is intended to represent the 
modern type of woman that is slowly 
emerging, one in whom the reason is assert- 
ing itself with a consequent approximation 
to the position of modem man. There is 
no half -allegorical implication in her final 
lapse; in returning to her husband she 
merely re-enacts the inability to press on in 
a chosen independent direction which one 
expects in Hardy's women. Between the 
two women, between Reason and Instinct, 
as between the Good and Evil Angels of 
the old moralities, stands Jude. The 
atrocious little figure of "Father Time," 
his murder of Sue's babies and his own 
suicide, are prophecies of the future gen- 
erations, foretold by Von Hartmann, who 
will thus rid themselves of the burden of 
the mystery of the world. A fog of 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



100 


THOMAS HARDY 


The hope- 
lessness of 
the book 


thought, perhaps one should say a miasma 
of despair, has settled down over the life 
depicted in this book. Through it the 
figures move dimly, sordidly, confusedly. 
The clear-cut outlines of earlier novels have 
disappeared. 

Jude the Obscure is the only one of 
Hardy's books through which there gleams 
no hope at all. The ciutain falls in Far 
from the Madding Crowd upon Oak and 
Bathsheba, less ardent, less joyous than 
before their bitter experiences, but con- 
tent. At the end of The Return of the 
Native Venn's fidelity is rewarded and Clym 
finds comfort in his work as a lay mission- 
ary. The Woodlanders closes as Fitzpiers 
and Grace go off the scene with a chance 
at least of future happiness, while Marty 
South at the grave of Winterbome is a 
pathetic rather than a tragic figiu-e. The 
Mayor of Casterbridge concludes with the 
deliberate statement of Elizabeth-Jane's 
''unbroken tranquility" in adult life. We 
have already noted the hopefulness, put 
there consciously or not, in Tess. But in 
Jude there is no hope, no cleansing of the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


101 


passions, no sense of "calm of mind, all 
passion spent." The darkness is utterly 
unrelieved; the humour of the earlier 
books is gone; no one is ever thoughtless 
or light-hearted. The words of Job which 
are upon Jude's dying lips seem not suffi- 
ciently despairing, for Job could say 
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
Him." Here we are brought to think 
rather of the grand chorus of the dead in 
Leopardi : 

In te, morte, si posa 
Nostra ignuda natura; 
Lieta no, ma sicura 
Deir antico dolor. . . . 
Pero ch' esser beato 
Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato. 

One cannot leave this great and terrible 
book without noting the power that has 
kept remorselessly to one theme, that has 
held the attention unswervingly upon one 
character, that has refused to lighten the 
burden of the story by the factitious means 
of making that character, or indeed any 
person in the book, attractive, appealing. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



102 


THOMAS HARDY 




or anything but drab and commonplace, 
and that has carried through the whole 
story in monotone. In moments of cool 
analysis one may be tempted to ask whether 
it is not the author himself who has doomed 
his puppets to disaster, for there is little 
individuality in the several characters who 
are differentiated one from another by little 
save differences in opinion. But the un- 
questionably powerful impression made is 
an answer to that criticism. Almost the 
opening words describe Jude as ''the sort 
of man who was bom to ache a good deal 
before the fall of the curtain upon his un- 
necessary life should signify that all was 
well with him again." Here we have the 
final example in Hardy of the substitution 
of the instrument of tragic anticipation for 
the instrument of tragic suspense. The 
theme is announced immediately; and the 
heart-aches, the needlessness, the falling 
curtain, and the return to "dateless ob- 
livion and divine repose" succeed each 
other like movements in a sombre sym- 
phony. Nor, finally, can one leave Jude 
without mention of the wonderful scene of 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



his first evening in ''the City of Light" 
when there throng around him memories 
of Chris tminster's illustrious dead and he 
seems to hear their voices, in diverse tones 
but all suggesting the way towards intel- 
lectual triumphs. 



His interest in creative romance failing 
him, Hardy turned to poetry. The poetic 
gift, though hidden almost completely from 
the public, had not been allowed to rust in 
him unused through all these years. He 
now entered upon the second portion of 
his career and produced a body of verse of 
merits entirely independent of his work in 
fiction. This verse must be considered 
later in a separate chapter. For the sake 
of convenience, however, the present chap- 
ter may conclude with a brief account of 
his life since the publication of The Well- 
Beloved, the last novel to appear in book- 
form. 

In 1898 Wessex Poems appeared with il- 
lustrations by the author. There followed 
in 1901 Poems of the Past and the Present. 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



103 



The later 
years: the 
abandon- 
ment of 
fiction and 
interest in 
poetry 



III 



104 


THOMAS HARDY 




Before either of these collections was pub- 
lished Hardy had laid down, about 1897, 
the general plan and had begun the com- 
position of the tremendous epic-drama of 
The Dynasts (three parts : 1904-6-8) which 
occupied most of his attention till its com- 
pletion in September, 1907. Since then he 
has issued three more volumes of miscel- 
laneous verse: Timers Laughing-Stocks 
(1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), and 
Moments of Vision (1917). In 1912 he 
supervised the publication of the Wessex 
edition of his writings in prose and verse, 
contributing to it a new general preface, 
additional prefaces to many of the novels, 
and a few notes. In this definitive edition 
the novels are arranged not chronologically 
but in accordance with a not altogether 
satisfactory scheme in three divisions as 
"Novels of Character and Environment," 
"Romances and Fantasies" and "Novels 
of Ingenuity." As an after-thought there 
was added in 1913 the voltime of so-called 
"Mixed Novels" already referred to. In 
1919 a second supplementary volume was 
published, containing the two collections of 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


105 


verse put forth since the edition was orig- 
inally prepared. 

The position of preeminence that Hardy- 
has held among living English writers since 
the death of Swinburne and A''Ieredith has 
been recognized, though it has been a 
matter for regret to his admirers that his 
fame upon the Continent has been insuffi- 
cient to bring to him the Nobel Prize. 
After Meredith's death he succeeded him 
as President of the Society of British 
Authors. In 1910 the Order of Merit was 
bestowed upon him. In 1912 he received 
the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of 
Literatiu-e, an honour rarely given. A trib- 
ute of a different kind is the increasing num- 
ber of critical studies of his writings that 
have appeared. Several recent ones sup- 
plement and in part supersede the earlier 
monographs by Lionel Johnson and Annie 
Macdonell. The most brilliant of these is 
by Lascelles Abercrombie (1912) who has 
the advantage of a poet's imaginative sym- 
pathy with a fellow-craftsman and who has 
achieved a book noteworthy for its archi- 
tectonic skill. The most ambitious is 


The 

greatest 

living 

English 

writer 

Critical 
studies of 
his writings 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



106 


THOMAS HARDY 




F. A. Hedgcock's Sorbonne dissertation, 
Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste (1910) 
which, inquiring more deeply than does 
Mr. Abercrombie,. brings the sex-conflict 
that forms so large a part of Hardy's sub- 
ject-matter into proper relation with the 
philosophic doctrine of the struggle between 
Intellect and Intuition. Unfortunately 
many pages of this bulky book are occupied 
with mere summaries of the plots of the 
novels. Besides other dissertations, Eng- 
lish and American, there are also studies 
by Harold Child and by H. C. Duffin (both 
1916), the former a brief but excellent sum- 
mary, the latter a larger and enthusiastic 
but rather ill-balanced piece of work. F. 0. 
Saxelby has produced a Thomas Hardy 
Dictionary of the names and places in all 
the writings, a monument of patient in- 
dustry. There is a host of books about 
the Wessex country: Wilkinson Sherren's 
The Wessex of Romance; C. G. Harper's 
The Hardy Country (which has some ex- 
cellent illustrations, including " several of 
peasants at their work); B. C. A. Windle's 
The Wessex oj Thomas Hardy (which con- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


107 


tains many pleasant line-drawings by E. 
H. New); Sidney Heath's The Heart of 
Wessex; and, most authoritative of all, 
Hennann Lea's Thomas Hardy^s Wessex 
which is issued as a supplementary volume 
to the Wessex edition of the works. 

In December, 1912, Mrs. Thomas Hardy 
died. The group of '' Poems of 1912-1913," 
destined, one hopes, to be known by the 
better title Veteris vestigia flammae, which 
Hardy wrote in her memory are both 
touching and extraordinary, quite unlike 
any other elegies in the language. In 1914 
Hardy married again, his second wife being 
Miss Florence Emily Dugdale, an old 
friend, who has been herself favorably 
known as a writer of books for children. 
During the Great War Hardy published a 
number of poems on public events as well 
as a letter to the Times on the bombard- 
ment of Rheims Cathedral. To-day, 
though he still contributes an occasional 
poem to The London Mercury or some 
other journal, we must regretfully suppose 
that his work is finished. In 1920 the mag- 
nificent Mellstock edition of his works be- 


Datur hora 
quieti 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



108 


THOMAS HARDY 




gan to appear. Late in that year there 
was unveiled at Dorchester a tablet to the 
memory of the townsmen who had fallen 
in the War. This was designed by Thomas 
Hardy and bears the following words from 
one of his poems as the motto: 

None dubious of the cause, none mur- 
muring. 

Could better words have been found to in- 
scribe above the names of those who fell 
in battle? 


III 


BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



III 

SOME MATTERS OF TECHNIQUE 
AND STYLE 

The titles of some of the monographs upon 
Hardy mentioned towards the close of the 
last chapter indicate the emphasis that 
critics have laid upon the artistic qualities 
of the Wessex novels, their structural ex- 
cellence. To deal adequately with Hardy's 
technique would require space beyond the 
limits of this brief survey. But the sub- 
ject cannot be entirely disregarded. In 
the too-little-known essay on "The Profit- 
able Reading of Fiction," which, if re- 
printed, would take its place with the pref- 
ace to The Nigger of the Narcissus as one 
of the most important recent pronounce- 
ments by an English novelist upon his art. 
Hardy notices the general lack of apprecia- 
tion of matters of craftsmanship in a novel 
as compared with the attention devoted to 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



109 



Hardy's 
fame as an 
artist 



III 



110 



But adverse 
comments 
have been 
made on 
the art of 
the novels 



particularly 
(1) the 
peasants 



THOMAS HARDY 



HI 



matters of content. It behoves us, there- 
fore, to pay what attention there is room 
for to this side of his achievement. 

There have been those who have raised 
scruples against the justice of the adjective 
"artistic" as applied to the Wessex novels, 
and it may be well to deal with these 
strictures at once. In general such pro- 
tests have been directed against those books 
in which the scene lies in great part beyond 
the country that Hardy has made partic- 
ularly his own and which depict a part of 
society with which he is not especially 
familiar. Enough has been said in the 
foregoing survey of the novels to indicate 
sympathy with those who regret the waste 
of effort upon the romances, or scenes from 
romances, that transcend for any length of 
time the boundaries of Wessex. 

On the other hand, strangely enough, 
frequent objections were offered by con- 
temporary reviewers to the lack of veri- 
similitude in Hardy's portrayal of the Wes- 
sex peasantry. Such critics singled out 
three points in particular: the rather ob- 
vious Shakespearean imitation in the draw- 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


111 


ing of some of the rustic characters; the 
incredible amount of wit and wisdom con- 
centrated in small gatherings of yokels; 
and the hybrid nature of the dialogue, part 
dialect, part standard English. The first 
objection (if it be an objection) may be 
granted. There is Shakespearean imita- 
tion in some of the rustic scenes, especially 
in the earlier books. The scene in the 
church-vault in A Pair of Blue Eyes; the 
drilling of the raw recruits in The Trumpet- 
Major; the constable's pursuit of the 
skimmity riders in The Mayor of Caster- 
bridge; and the constable and his crew in 
the short story of "The Three Strangers" 
are instances in point. But the flavoin- of 
literary reminiscence has chaiiiied many 
readers and is not in itself a thing to be 
deprecated; to catch the tone and manner 
of Shakespeare's rustic humour is no mean 
accomplishment. And the scenes and 
characters inspire a satisfactory answer to 
the only important questions in judging 
works of the imagination: Do they please? 
Are they genuine? Of the second objec- 
tion it may be said that the lack of a reg- 


Shake- 
spearean 
echoes 

The wit of 
the yokels 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



112 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

compromise 
in the use 
of dialect 


ular education, even the fact of illiteracy, 
does not preclude the possibility of possess- 
ing mother-wit, and often rather sharpens 
such wit. In part, too, as in Shakespeare, 
the humour of the scene grows, not out of 
the wit, but out of the dtimbness of the 
speakers. Moreover it depends in large 
part upon Hardy's ironical comments and 
interpretations. And in any case art is 
justified in heightening effects that exist, 
though in more subdued form, in life. 
Hardy himself has taken the trouble to 
answer the criticism directed against the 
compromise that he has employed in his 
use of dialect. He writes -.^^ 

An author may be said to fairly convey 
the spirit of intelligent peasant talk if he 
retains the idiom, compass, and charac- 
teristic expressions, although he may not 
encumber the page with obsolete pro- 
nunciations of the purely English words, 
and with mispronunciations of those de- 
rived from Latin and Greek. ... If a 
writer attempts to exhibit on paper the 
precise accents of a rustic speaker, he 
disturbs the proper balance of a true rep- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


113 


resentation by unduly insisting upon the 
grotesque element. 

This is certainly true. Hardy has suc- 
cessfully accomplished a much more diffi- 
cult effect than the mere phonological re- 
production of dialect, which is a feat not 
above the abilities of any Sam Slick or Josh 
Billings. And in adopting this compromise 
he opened the way to a far wider audience 
than could have been reached by any lit- 
erary work, hoM^ever excellent, in dialect 
form. How few people — to take an exam- 
ple from Hardy's own country — know the 
beautiful verse of William Barnes, who 
committed his fame to the keeping of a 
fonn of speech, of dignified ancestry it is 
true, but local and obsolescent. The ver- 
dict of entire success now everywhere 
meted out to Hardy's rustic scenes is the 
final comment on these adverse criticisms. 
Another objection is more serious. It 
concerns the excessive use of coincidence 
throughout the novels. We have already 
had occasion to note how often such freaks 
of fortune occur in .4 Pair of Blue Eyes. 


(2) the use 
of coinci- 
dence 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



114 


THOMAS HARDY 




It is needless to give an exhaustive list of 
instances from other books; but here are 
a few striking examples. Upon the chance 
of Fanny's going to the wrong church the 
whole train of disasters in Far from the 
Madding Crowd follows. Upon the dicing 
adventures of Wilde ve, Christian Cantle 
and Venn, and Venn's consequent error 
about the ownership of the guineas, hangs 
the tragedy of Clym's irreconciliation with 
his mother, while the last possibility of 
saving Eustacia was lost by the chance 
that Captain Vye failed to hand Clym's 
letter to her. This motive of the unre- 
ceived letter plays an equally important 
part in Tess. In that novel there is a 
whole series of might-have-been-otherwise 
events, of points where a slight turn in the 
scale of chance would have mitigated or 
thwarted the tragedy. Such extraordinary 
juxtapositions of events have their parallels 
in each one of the novels. Moreover Hardy 
often wrings the last drop of improbability 
out of such situations. The dicing scene 
in The Return of the Native, for example, 
might have been worked out to the same 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


115 


conclusion, with the same bearing upon the 
course of events, without such extraordi- 
nary fluctuations of fortune and especially 
without the last two throws (an ace, fol- 
lowed by a blank or zero caused by the die 
splitting and falling with both cleft surfaces 
upwards). An instance of how this sort 
of scene may be conducted without such 
absurd exaggeration is the adventure of 
Rastignac in the gambling-house. Frankly, 
it must be admitted that Hardy often fol- 
lows his natural bent towards the mysteri- 
ous and improbable to the point where he 
overreaches himself in the employment of 
coincidence. But two pleas may be en- 
tered in his behalf. One — it is hardly 
valid — is that he never completely shook 
off the literary influences of his apprentice- 
ship to the school of "sensation novelists" 
who made abundant use of the same device. 
The other and stronger plea is the fact that 
Hardy senses, and in the endeavor to bring 
it home to the reader exaggerates, the 
factor of chance in life. His indictment 
against life is that it is so ordered that such 
chances as occur again and again in the 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



116 


THOMAS HARDY 


(3) sen- 
sational 
devices 


novels dictate often the misery or happi- 
ness of human creatures. 

Of the same literary origin as his use of 
coincidence is Hardy's employment of sen- 
sational devices and situations. Of this, 
too, he never wholly rid himself. Des- 
perate Remedies, as we have seen, is filled 
with such: mystery with regard to birth, 
burning buildings, murder and a walled-up 
corpse, midnight spies, mysterious sounds 
thrice foretelling important events, and 
much else. In one place the use of capital 
letters to convey to the reader the excite- 
ment of the speaker betrays clearly the in- 
fluence of Charles Reade. The later books 
are never so dependent on sensationalism, 
but most of them offer the same commodity 
at one time or another in concentrated 
fonn: the cliff episode in A Pair of Blue 
Eyes; the rick-burning, Troy's sword-exer- 
cise, and the murder of Troy in Far from 
the Madding Crowd; the gambling episode 
in The Return of the Native; the burning of 
the castle in A Laodicean; Clare's sleep- 
walking with Tess in his arms; and the 
death of the children in Jude are examples 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


117 


that come quickly to mind. Such scenes 
are admissible in novels of another sort, 
but in general they are out of accord with 
the austere control exhibited by Hardy in 
other respects. Moreover they are in act- 
uality of too rare occurrence to be repre- 
sentative of life; and the novel vshould re- 
flect the great norm of existence, not the 
isolated exceptional phenomena. In re- 
cording these points of disapproval one 
must not forget that in the essay referred 
to at the beginning of this chapter Hardy 
pleads for a slavish belief in the author on 
the part of his reader "however profusely 
he may pour out his coincidences, his mar- 
vellous juxtapositions." When all is said, 
the scattered melodramatic episodes sink 
to insignificance among the crowd of in- 
teresting, picturesque and thrilling scenes 
that yet remain within the limits of artistic 
verisimilitude. 

In projecting a series of novels the action 
of which occiu-s for the most part within a 
narrow stretch of country, a district over 


* 

The links 
between the 
novels 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



118 


THOMAS HARDY 




much of which it is possible to walk in the 
course of a week-end excursion, there must 
have been some temptation to connect the 
several books together by introducing the 
same characters into two or more of them. 
Zola employed this method through a long 
series of stories dealing with the fortunes 
of various members of the same family. 
In the Comedie Humaine a vast crowd of 
people come and go, and there is presented 
now one phase and now another in the 
career of various principal personages, with 
a resultant confusion that requires a sort 
of guidebook if we are properly to follow 
the lives of such outstanding characters as, 
say, Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, 
Vautrin, or the Baron Nucingen, The 
Barchester novels are similarly, though 
less complexly, woven together. Thack- 
eray uses such linlcs hardly ever; Dickens, 
so far as one remembers, not at all. Hardy, 
except for one purpose, has avoided this 
possible mode of procedure, the unity of 
background being depended on to link the 
series of tales together. The exceptions 
occur when some one is introduced as a 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


119 


minor character, to reinforce the impression 
of time and place, as part of the locaHty 
(as it were) in one story who in another 
story is of psychological importance. Thus 
Conjuror Trendle, who is a principal actor 
in "The Withered Arm," is just men- 
tioned in Tess, the time and general local- 
ity of the two tales being thus fixed as 
about the same. In Tess, too, occurs an 
amusing anecdote (to be referred to again 
in the next chapter) of William Dewy's 
youth, thus connecting that novel with 
Under the Greenwood Tree in which Dewy 
appears as an old man. Farmer Shinar, 
one of Fancy Day's lovers in the latter 
story, appears as one of the agriculturists 
in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Darton, the 
chief character in "Interlopers at the 
Knap," is likewise mentioned in that book. 
And the appearance of Farmer Everdene 
and "a silent, reserved young man named 
Boldwood" among Henchard's creditors 
fixes the date of The Mayor of Casterbridge 
as some fifteen or twenty years earlier than 
that of Far from the Madding Crowd. It is 
pleasing (glancing ahead for a moment to 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



120 


THOMAS HARDY 


Links 
between 
the novels 
and the 
poems 


the poems) to come across a Wessex volun- 
teer in The Dynasts named Cantle, for it is 
a reminder of how old Granfer Cantle in 
The Return of the Native used to recall 
memories of his warlike youth in "the 
Bang-up Locals." Again in The Dynasts 
Bob Loveday is mentioned as among the 
sailors who walked in Nelson's funeral 
procession; and this brings to mind mem- 
ories of The Trumpet-Major. And the 
appearance of Solomon Longways connects 
the epic-drama with the lowly tragedy of 
The Mayor of Caster bridge. Between the 
short poems and the novels there are sev- 
eral such links. "Tess's Lament" is an 
attempt (more successful perhaps than 
some critics have allowed it to be) to render 
in quintessential form Tess's feelings after 
Clare's abandonment of her. '*'The Pine- 
Planters" is an exquisite reverie upon two 
motives in The Woodlanders. "The Moth- 
Signal" calls to" mind a scene in The Return 
of the Native. "Friends Beyond" and 
"The Dead Choir" memorialize Tranter 
Dewy and his fellows in Under the Green- 
wood Tree. The verses called "The Well- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


121 


Beloved" are a meditation upon the theme 
illustrated at large in the novel of the same 
name. There are other less definite con- 
nections between the two portions of 
Hardy's work. He has thus with faint, 
fine, infrequent touches linked together the 
persons of his imagination, without ever 
approaching the point where such links be- 
come confusing entanglements. 

In the essay already referred to several 
times, Hardy remarks: "To a masterpiece 
in story there appertains a beauty of shape, 
no less than to a masterpiece in pictorial or 
plastic art"; and he instances The Bride of 
Lammermoor as an almost perfect specimen 
of form, dwelling also upon the constructive 
art of Richardson, while questioning the 
validity of the claim of Tom Jones to pre- 
eminence in this regard. The remark 
opens up a wide field for discussion concern- 
ing the Wessex novels. Only a few out- 
standing matters can be touched on here. 

A certain method of opening his stories — 
used occasionally by Scott, who, however, 


To a 

masterpiece 
in story^ 
there P 
appertains 
a beauty 
of shape 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



122 


THOMAS HARDY 


Hardy's 
openings 


did not realize its possibilities — may be 
observed in Hardy's novels to an extent 
which makes it almost a mannerism. It is 
justified, however, by the effect that it pro- 
duces. The story begins on a road or path 
along which some person is moving. Here 
are some typical examples. In Under the 
Greenwood Tree the choir-men are walking 
along the road; in Far from the Madding 
Crowd Oak meets Bathsheba as she drives 
along; the first human beings who appear 
in The Return of the Native are Venn and 
the occupants of his van; The Mayor of 
Casterbridge first presents us with Henchard 
and his family on their way to the fair- 
grounds; in The Woodlanders we first see 
the barber on his way to the cottage of 
Marty South; in Two on a Tower it is Lady 
Constantine in her landau; in Tess, the 
antiquarian clergyman accosts Durbeyfield 
on the road; in "Fellow-Townsmen" 
Barhet meets Downe on the turnpike; 
Fanner Darton is discovered at the begin- 
ning of "Interlopers at the Knap" riding 
towards the home of his bride-to-be; 
Pierston in The Well-Beloved is walking 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


123 


along the street of Wells as the story- 
opens; in the second chapter of A Pair of 
Blue Eyes Smith is seen driving towards the 
vicarage; in the second section of ''The 
Withered Arm" Lodge is discovered driv- 
ing home with his wife. These instances 
are sufficient for our purpose. What is the 
effect produced by such a beginning? In 
almost every case the reader seems, if it 
may be so expressed, to be moving with the 
protagonists or with those connected in 
fortune with them, into the theatre of 
action. The scene whereon the coming 
tragedy or tragi-comedy is to be displayed 
is thus gradually unfolded, the outer coun- 
try is left behind, the unity of action is 
strengthened, and the unity of place. A 
similar device is employed in several books 
in which there is a sort of prologue in one 
locality after which the action moves to 
another place around which it clings and 
which it seldom, sometimes never, leaves 
again. Examples of this are: Desperate 
Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, 
and The Mayor of Casterbridge. In The 
Woodlanders the unity of place is almost 


The eflfect 
produced 
by these 
openings 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



124 


THOMAS HARDY 




inviolate; note how the London episode of 
the divorce proceedings is reported by letter 
and how Mrs. Charinond's death on the 
Continent is narrated by one of the char- 
acters. In The Return of the Native this 
unity is absolute and the unfolding of the 
action uninterruptedly on the heath adds 
greatly to the impressiveness of a tragedy 
in which environment plays so overwhelm- 
ing a part. One should remark also in the 
same book the swiftness of the blows of 
Circtimstance, for the entire action takes 
place in a year and a day, thus preserving 
in some sort the unity of time. The ob- 
servance of such once-styled ''rules" is of 
course by no means an essential part of the 
novelist's art, but beyond question in these 
particular cases it aids greatly in producing 
the desired effect. Admirable also are 
such contrivances of structure as that of 
The Woodlanders which begins and closes 
upon the solitary figure of Marty South, 
self-sacrificing in the first scene for her 
father and loyal in the last to the memory 
of Winterbome. Henchard leaves Caster- 
iDridge in the same forlorn and outcast state 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


125 


as that in which he had arrived twenty- 
years before. The Return of the Native ex- 
hibits at the opening the form of Eustacia 
upon Rainbarrow and ends with Clym 
upon the same gaunt hillside. It is un- 
deniable that there is some loss of artistic 
excellence in Tess and particularly in Jude 
in which the action seems to jerk as it moves 
from place to place. 

Just as Hardy gradually leads his reader 
into the story by means of an opening seene 
upon the road or by a kind of prologue in 
one place before the removal of the action 
to its permanent seat, so does he gradually 
unfold the appearance and characteristic 
traits of his principal personages. There 
are no long, prolegomenous, set descriptions 
such as occur so often in some other novel- 
ists, notably in Balzac. One finds no such 
full-length character-portraits at the begin- 
ning of his books as that of "The Chief" in 
Meredith's Vittoria. Even the sketch of 
Oak with which Far from the Madding 
Crowd begins is expanded in an exceptional 
manner. One may contrast the technique 
of Smollett, Scott and especially Dickens. 


The 

drawing of 
character 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



126 


THOMAS HARDY 




Their elaborate descriptions of characters 
on their first appearance go back through 
the eighteenth-century essay to the "char- 
acter-writers" of the seventeenth century. 
To introduce such full-length portraits into 
a novel is psychologically bad. One does 
not really follow this order in observing 
people. In reality the eye first lights upon 
some one particular thing — an individuality 
or oddity of dress or manner or speech — and 
it is aroimd this quality that other char- 
acteristics gradually accumulate. Hardy 
is well aware of this. He avoids most suc- 
cessfully the common error of describing at 
once and in great detail the appearance of 
persons in whom the reader is not yet in- 
terested. This is generally accomplished 
by letting the reader come across the char- 
acter, as it were, much as any stranger in 
the book might chance upon him. Very 
often the scene is at night, or else in some 
place where shadows veil details. Thus — 
to take two instances only out of many — 
Oak passes Bathsheba on the road and the 
reader is furnished with just so much de- 
scription of her as could come within Oak's 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


127 


observation of her on that occasion. 
Again: Eustacia first appears outlined 
against the sky on Rainbarrow, a slim, ro- 
mantic figure only. Presently the light of 
the November bonfire reveals her features 
fitfully and mysteriously. Her appearance 
becomes more fully descried by the light in 
her grandfather's house on her return home. 
But it is only the next day, by which time 
our interest is fully aroused, that the morn- 
ing light enables one to discern clearly her 
form and features and to read thereon the 
characteristics of her nature. 

In no way are Hardy's sense of propor- 
tion and his feeling for relative values more 
finely shown than in the comparative 
amounts of detail that are worked into his 
character-drawing. In all the great novels 
the full light is thrown upon a few central 
figures, and even within that narrow circle 
there are different degrees of illumination. 
Hardy is here at the opposite pole from 
Balzac, who portrays not only minor figiures 
but often merely incidental persons, peo- 
ple who are but parts of the background 
and have no influence upon the course of 


Hardy's 
feeling for 
relative 
values 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



128 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

exclusion of 
non-essen- 
tials 


events — the woman who sells nuts to Cesar 
Birotteau, for example — with an elaborate 
care equal often to that expended upon his 
principal personages. It is amusing to 
imagine to what lengths of digression the 
peculiar genius of Balzac or of Dickens 
would have been led in the portrayal of 
Eustacia's grandfather, the old sea-faring 
man, whom Hardy is content to leave quite 
in the backgroimd. Throughout the Wes- 
sex novels it would be easy to chart the 
degrees in the descenrling scale from such 
commanding figures as, say, Henchard or 
Jude or Tess, through secondary people like 
Farfrae or Phillotson or Boldwood, to the 
crowd of fanners and merchants and other 
people of a superior social order, and, apart 
from them, to the .background of rustics. 
Moreover, in drawing his portraits Hardy 
practises a rigid exclusion of non-essentials. 
We hear nothing of Clym's life in Paris and 
only so much of Smith's journey to the 
East as is needed in order to understand 
his relations with Knight and Elfrida. 
Boldwood's young manhood does not con- 
cern the fortunes of Bathsheba and there- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


129 


fore nothing is told of it. A second Mrs. 
C. C. Clarke might write a "Girlhood of 
Hardy's Heroines" with opportunities for 
the display of sentimental fancy equal to 
those afforded by Shakespeare. What wil- 
ful, naughty, high-strung children they 
must have been! Yet Hardy tells us 
nothing of their early life. His unbroken 
rule is to tell just so much of the life-.story 
of his characters as it is necessary to know 
to follow his theme. Thus, after Tess's 
departure from Alec, the course of her 
seducer's life is ignored save for the meet- 
ing with the elder Mr. Clare, which is told 
by Angel to Tess and which, as it brings 
about Alec's "conversion," is of tre- 
mendous importance to her. There was 
tragedy in the life of Phillotson dtiring the 
years between the time that he took leave 
of Jude to study for the ministry and his 
reappearance as a poor school-master — but 
of this we hear nothing; it does not concern 
Jude Fawley. Again: the motives that 
led Farfrae to come to Casterbridge and 
the coiu-se of his career after Henchard's 
death are both interesting subjects; but 




AND MONOGRAPHS 

! . — 


III 



130 


THOMAS HARDY 


Selection 
and sub- 
ordination 
of incidents 


they have no bearing upon Henchard and 
are consequently omitted. Certainly the 
historian of Cesar BiroUeau and La Maison 
Nucingen would not have resisted the 
temptation to recount the steps by which 
Henchard made his fortune; but Hardy's 
reserve is equal to this test also. 

There is a similar subordination (though 
this is more difficult to illustrate) of details 
to the total effect in the matter of incidents 
and episodes, and all events are stressed in 
proportion to their importance for the gen- 
eral theme. To this rule there are two jus- 
tifiable exceptions. As a means of sustain- 
ing interest some spectacular events, such 
as Knight's accident or the rain-storm on 
the night of Fanny's burial, are more 
minutely portrayed than is strictly neces- 
sary for the conduct of the story. And 
there are, of course, the rustic scenes in 
which the peasants comment upon the 
doings of their superiors, which are intro- 
duced as a sort of interlude. 

In many of the novels great care is taken 
to harmonize the setting with the event 
that takes place therein. Contrast, for 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


131 


example, Bathsheba's meeting for the first 
time with each of her three lovers. Oak 
she first sees while he is occupied with his 
ewes in the lambing season. Boldwood 
rides up to her door and away again im- 
petuously. Troy she encounters on a dark 
path and her skirt is caught by his sword. 
In The Woodlanders Marty is seen for the 
first time in the lonely cottage and for the 
last time by the lonely grave. In ^4 Group 
of Noble Dames as night comes on the 
stories told by the members of the anti- 
quarian club become darker in tone. In 
Tess the adjustment of place and season is 
accomplished with the highest art. It is 
spring-time at the beginning of the tale. 
Tess goes to the home of the pseudo-D'Ur- 
bervilles in high summer and returns from 
Alec amid autimmal decay. It is summer 
again on the dairy-farm and winter on the 
wedding-day and again at Flintcomb-Ash. 
So also the action moves in appropriate 
places. The initial tragedy of Tess's life 
takes place in the gloomy woodland called 
the Chase; the courtship of Angel and Tess 
goes on amid the imconventional, bright 


Harmoniz- 
ing of 

setting with 
event 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



132 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

isolated 

setting 


sensuousness of Talbothay's dairy; the 
wedding-night passes in the dark ancestral 
manor-house of the D'Urbervilles and in 
the ruined abbey near by; Tess, the de- 
serted wife, supports herself on the harsh 
and unsympathetic Flintcomb-Ash farm; 
the murder of Alec occurs in a tawdry sea- 
side boarding-house; and the last night 
with Clare passes at Stonehenge, Tess the 
destined victim of social conventions shel- 
tering herself in the ruins of the pagan tem- 
ple where, thousands of years before, her 
ancestors had been sacrificed upon the altar 
of a barbarous religion. 

The rural setting of the novels in a se- 
questered vale of life, though it greatly re- 
stricts Hardy's range of subject and char- 
acter, possesses corresponding advantages. 
It confirms the unity of effect. It accounts 
plausibly for the close interconnections of 
the various personages. It explains the 
absence of various conventions that have 
been imposed on more ''advanced" com- 
munities and gives ample room for the ex- 
pression of individuality without the check 
that arises from the power of the reason 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



when strengthened by convention. Hence 
it is the appropriate ground for men and 
women yielding to the dictates of instinct; 
warm, elemental, vigorous human beings 
who are close to earth. From the setting, 
too, comes the sense of detachment and 
separation from the outside world that 
makes each novel seem complete in itself 
and unlike the imaginary scene of many 
other writers whose novels seem mere frag- 
ments of a larger world. There is a con- 
sequent loss of breadth, perhaps, but there 
is a gain in intensity. Analogies suggest 
themselves from the graphic and plastic 
arts where certain compositions contain 
lines that seem to reach out beyond the 
limits of the subject while certain others 
are so grouped as to possess only curves 
that turn harmoniously inward. Hardy, 
as we have seen, never relies upon the su- 
pernatural, yet the remoteness and self- 
sufficiency of his setting remove him far 
from the realists. His art sheds a sombre 
''light that never was on sea or land" over 
his scene ; he is constantly upon the borders 
of the Unknowable. 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



133 



III 



134 


THOMAS HARDY 


Hardy's 
style 


If his books are read with proper atten- 
tion to their technique, it will be admitted, 
then, that in his greater works he has real- 
ized his own ideal of imparting to master- 
pieces of story a beauty of shape such as is 
found in masterpieces of pictorial or plastic 
art. There is a like attention paid to 
grouping, selection, subordination, em- 
phasis, and harmonious composition. The 
lines of the stories may be traced and they 
will fall into large, simple, unabrupt curves. 
The growth of the story proceeds gradually; 
the interest rises towards the centre; and 
there is an equally gradual subsidence of 
emotional tensity at the close. In these 
large matters of structure and design 
Hardy's art at its best is almost impec- 
cable. But what about the medium in 
which he works? 

* * * 

Hardy is not a "stylist" in the sense of 
the word as it is used of De Quincey or 
Ruskin or Pater or Meredith or James. 
He does not display that sheer delight in 
the use of language for its own sake, beauti- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


135 


fully or forcefully or subtly or cleverly, 
which is the mark of the virtuoso. He is 
interested in what he has to say far more 
than in the way in which he says it. He is 
willing at times to sacrifice elegance and 
grace to precision. The aphorisms scat- 
tered through the novels (such as the many 
comments upon women to be found in Far 
from the Madding Crowd) are not, like 
Meredith's polished jewels, exotics valued 
for themselves, but are of importance as 
integral parts of the writer's theme. His 
literary allusions and those to the fine arts 
are not learned appendages but are intro- 
duced to render more vivid the situation or 
to cast additional light upon the character 
he is drawing. If Meredith is an artist in 
m.etaphor, then is Hardy equally an artist 
in simile. The contrast is more real than 
are most of the comparisons that have been 
made between the two men. The use of 
simile is to be expected from so keen an 
observer as Hardy. A telHng number of 
forced and harsh and ugly similes can easily 
be gathered from the novels; but they are 
more than offset by the host of those that 


His 

similes 


AND MONOGRAPHS . 


III 



136 


THOMAS HARDY 


• 


are apt and often exquisite. The point to 
be made here is that just as metaphor in 
the hands of Carlyle becomes itself a 
metaphor of his transcendentalism, so is 
simile appropriate to Hardy, for by his use 
of this figure of speech he suggests on every 
page of his writings the intimate interrela- 
tion of human beings and human affairs 
with the natural world around them. 
Take a single instance of this : 

To see her hair was to fancy that a whole 
winter did not contain darkness enough 
to form its shadow; it closed over her 
forehead like nightfall extinguishing the 
western glow. 

There is a cosmic quality in this. With 
the reference to the fading twilight and to 
wintry darkness a curtain seems, as it 
were, to rise for an instant behind Eustacia 
and we catch a glimpse of the vast, un- 
known stretch of the universe beyond her. 
In a moment it falls and we are face to 
face with humanity again. In the same 
novel the comparison of Eustacia's sun-lit 
mouth to a red tulip calls up far-reaching 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


137 


suggestions of a different order, and the 
tenderness with which the boy holds her 
hand — ''like that of a child holding a cap- 
tured sparrow" — of a different kind still. 
It is easy to pass over single instances of 
these kinds without stopping to analyze 
them; but as they occur again and again 
there comes to be a growing impression of 
how each individual life contains in little 
the characteristics of the Whole, of how in 
any small series of events there are implica- 
tions as wide as the universe. This im- 
pression, as we shall see, is one of the most 
powerful produced by Hardy's poems. 

It has just been said that Hardy's is the 
style, or the absence of style, that comes 
from a man intent upon what he has to say. 
From this fact flow two consequences. 
When he is bored by his subject he be- 
comes, not slip-shod, not hurried and 
scamping, but plodding, conscientious, 
sometimes dull. He is then rigid and di- 
dactic and it is then that there come those 
over-technical descriptions to which refer- 
ence has already been made. Then, too, 
are found the passages of uninspired phil- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



138 


THOMAS HARDY 


Narrative 
style 

Dialogue 


osophizing that remind one of George Eliot. 
On the other hand, he invariably rises to 
the heights demanded of great situations 
in narrative. Knight's accident on the 
cliff; Fanny's burial; Mrs. Yeobright's re- 
turn across the heath; Henchard's wed- 
ding-gift to his daughter; the Midsummer 
Eve in the forest; Tess in the Chase; the 
death of Jude — ^the insight and strength 
and exactitude of such scenes is tremen- 
dous. Here, as in the large design of the 
books, so in the choice of words, there is a 
strict exclusion of non-essentials, a selec- 
tion of the precise words required. . And 
he has mastered the opposing principles of 
the exactitude demanded of the naturalist 
and the power of suggestion expected of 
the romancer. His descriptive and nar- 
rative powers reach their height in the ex- 
traordinary prose stage-directions in The 
Dynasts. But he is by no means so nearly 
faultless in dialogue. This weakness ac- 
counts in part for the impression of im- 
maturity made by A Pair of Blue Eyes in 
which much of the story is conveyed in 
dialogue (a bit of technique that Hardy 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


139 


fell heir to from Reade and Collins). The 
situation between Clym and Eustacia fol- 
lowing the boy's revelation of the circum- 
stances of Mrs. Yeobright's death is con- 
vincing beyond the abilities of almost any 
English novelist; the train of circum- 
stances leads unbrokenly and unhesitat- 
ingly to the catastrophe; it was unques- 
tionably a scene a faire; but the words put 
into the mouth of Clym and of his wife 
lack an undefinable something of reality. 
They are literary. The vision is not abso- 
lute. They are what a husband and wife 
would be expected to say in such a situation 
rather than what Clym and Eustacia must 
necessarily have said on that particular 
morning. The same is true of the great 
scene between Clare and Tess on their 
wedding-night and it might be paralleled 
in many other places in the novels. Yet 
even Thackeray, who is a far finer master 
of dialogue than is Hardy, did not quite 
succeed in the dialogue of the scene between 
Rawdon and Becky and Lord Steyne; and 
where Thackeray has fallen short of com- 
plete success it is no dishonour to Hardy to 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



140 


THOMAS HARDY 




have nearly failed. Balzac might have 
succeeded; but who else? 

These strictures with regard to dialogue 
do not hold good of the rustic scenes. 
There Hardy is uniformly successful. It is 
almost a paradox to say that in the dialogue 
that owes most to literary reminiscence he 
is nearest to life, to the impression of 
actuality; but it is true of the talk of his 
yokels. The ease and lightness, the per- 
fect haiinonizing of effort with the result 
achieved, is one proof of how well Hardy 
knows the country of his birth. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


141 


IV 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WES- 
SEX 

Hardy knows the Southern counties as 
Gilbert White knew Selborne; the towns 
and villages, their history and inhabitants 
and customs as Mr. Bennett knows the Five 
Towns. The minutest objects and occur- 
rences of the country-side are as familiar to 
him as to Richard Jefferies and his range is 
far more extensive. He is the natural his- 
torian of Wessex. He follows the Brontes, 
George Eliot, Trollope, WilHam Black, and 
Blackmore in the development of the lit- 
erary genre known as ''Regionalism" and 
is thus related to such English writers as 
Mr. Bennett and Mr. Phillpotts, to the 
various exploiters of Ireland, the High- 
lands, Wales, Shropshire, the East Coast, 
and the Isle of Man; and in France to 
Henry Bordeaux among others. He 


Regional- 
ism 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



142 


THOMAS HARDY 


^ 


knows Wessex as Balzac knew Paris and 
Touraine, as Scott knew the Border Coun- 
try, as Dickens knew London. But he 
never seems to go forth into new locaHties 
seeking what has come to be called "local 
coloiu*," as Dickens went forth, note-book 
in hand, into Yorkshire. One cannot 
imagine Hardy subjecting himself to a 
severe course of " docimientation " as did 
Flaubert. Nor could he have disguised 
himself, like Zola, as a workman in order to 
gain experiences of the slums of a great 
city; or — again like Zola — conscientiously 
take dejeuner with an actress in order to 
become acquainted with the demi-monde. 
But Hardy's knowledge of the life of 
Casterbridge or Mellstock or Budmouth is 
kept subservient to the purposes of his 
story. He reproduces only such portions 
of a village's multifarious activities as are 
needed for his theme. There is no such 
impression of the confusion and bustle of 
the little world of a small town as we find 
in Balzac. Gissing knew the East End of 
London as intimately as Hardy knows 
Wessex, but there is tragedy in that in- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


143 


timacy, for the slums were forced upon 
Gissing and, hating the people, he por- 
trayed their life only because it was the 
material for fiction that he had ready to 
hand. Hardy, on the contrary, is steeped 
in, and loves, the heaths and farms and 
woodlands, the customs and traditions and 
superstitions among which he lives and 
which are enshrined in his writings. He 
describes them, not as the carefully obser- 
vant tourist would do, from the point of 
view of an outsider, but as one familiar 
with them through a lifetime. His knowl- 
edge is accurate in detail; but that is not 
all. He has imaginative sympathy and a 
consciousness of the close relationship of 
man and the natural world amidst which 
he moves and of which he is a part. 

Though his mind has been impregnated 
with modern ideas, his temperament is es- 
sentially rustic, primitive, pagan. His de- 
scription of Angel Clare applie^s to himself : 
*' Early association with country solitudes 
had bred in him an unconquerable and al- 
most unreasonable aversion to modern 
town life." There is no urban element in 


The 

limitations 
of his world 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



144 


THOMAS HARDY 




his nature and therefore a vast field of 
human experience is almost hidden from 
him. For Hardy's counsel Meredith 
might have written the sonnet called 
''Earth's Secret": 

Not soUtarily in fields we find 

Earth's secret open, though one page is 

there; 
Her plainest, such as children spell, and 

share 
With bird and beast; raised letters for 

the blind. 
Nor where the troubled passions toss the 

mind, 
In turbid cities, can the key be bare. 
It hangs for those who hither thither fare, 
Close interthreading nature with our 

kind. 

It is quite true, as Hardy writes in his 
General Preface, that the objection that 
novels that evolve their action on a cir- 
ctunscribed scene cannot be inclusive in 
their exhibition of human nature, does not 
hold good in respect of the elementary 
passions. But the passions and motives 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



and manners of sophisticated society form 
no part of his world. 

Every book and essay on Hardy devotes 
much attention to his 'treatment of Na- 
ture." Three stages in this attitude may 
be roughly indicated: at first Nature is 
regarded, with something of the "pathetic 
fallacy," as a conspirator against Man; 
later as a fellow-sufferer with Man; and at 
length Nature gradually disappears from 
the field of Hardy's interest — in Jude en- 
tirely so, though there is a recurrence to 
her in many of the poems. 

Passages illustrative of Hardy's powers 
of observation and description have been 
quoted by all writers upon him. But no 
matter how often it has been done no sur- 
vey of Hardy's achievement can pretend 
to completeness that does not call atten- 
tion again to this side of his work. Bear- 
ing in mind, however, the great amount 
that has been written on this subject, one 
may avoid the temptation to gather to- 
gether a whole anthology of exquisite word- 
pictures of heath and orchard and meadow- 
land; of moth and rabbit and hedge-hog 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



145 



The 

develop- 
ment of his 
attitude 
towards 
Nature 



III 



146 



His powers 
of observa- 
tion 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



and all the creatures of the country; and 
one may be content with noting a few typ- 
ical instances only. The mere turning of 
his pages will quickly supply a hundred 
more. 

Of the dwellers in the woodland he says 
that they possess "an almost exhaustive 
biographical or historical acquaintance 
with every object, animate and inanimate, 
within the observer's horizon." The re- 
mark applies to himself, and his horizon is 
all Wessex. Throughout the novels the 
sights and sounds and smells, the birds and 
beasts, the trees and brooks and flowers, 
are recorded with a light, deft touch, neither 
over-scientific and technical, nor inaccu- 
rate and vague. No natural phenomenon 
is too grand for his pen. He watches the 
motions of the constellations and tells the 
hour by the position they have attained. 
He records the progress of the storm, the 
contrasting and increasing brilliance of the 
lightning, the various rollings of the 
thunder. Nor is any event too small for 
his sympathy. The humble toad seeking 
shelter and the spiders that drop from the 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


147 


ceiling are signs of the coming stonn. He 
notes the "musical breathings" of the pine 
which begin as soon as the young tree is 
set in the ground. He describes the "tiny- 
crackling of the dead leaves" as they re- 
turn to their proper position after the 
passage of feet over them. As a sign of 
coming spring he records that "birds be- 
gan not to mind getting wet." What in- 
timate affection is in that remark! Hu- 
morous but loving comprehension of a dog's 
nature is seen in the account of the well- 
meant but disastrous exertions of Oak's 
younger sheep-dog. He is tolerant of the 
only half -angry bull that annoys Elizabeth- 
Jane and admires the splendour of its puz- 
zled rage when it is trapped in the barn. 
The ways of cows are revealed in Tess and 
of sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd. 
With a humour that is akin to pathos yet 
has in it nothing of Sterne's sentimentality 
he narrates the death of the Durbeyfields' 
horse. Cats are not so highly honoured as 
they deserve to be in the Wessex novels; 
but it is pleasant to know that Max Gate 
shelters several and that they have been as 




BRYN MAWR NOTES 


III 



148 


THOMAS HARDY 




much loved by Hardy as by Samuel Butler 
and George Moore. 

He never tires of recording the changes 
in the animal and vegetable worlds as the 
seasons pass over them. He sets down in 
detail ''the change from the handsome to 
the curious which the features of a wood 
undergo at the ingress of the winter 
months." The urge and stir of returning 
life in the spring never fail to move him. 
He contrasts the sound of rain-drops as 
they fall on different kinds of ground: 
"Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed that 
they were passing by a pasture, then a 
patter would show that the rain fell upon 
some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling 
plash announced the naked arable." He 
can differentiate between the various 
sounds of the wind as it blows through trees 
of different species, and as it passes over 
various parts of the heath. Signs of com- 
ing rain and of returning fair weather are 
clear to him. From him we can learn the 
contrasting appearance of bonfires accord- 
ing to the sort of wood or brush that is 
being btunt in them. He loves fires — par- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



ticularly at night. Night in all her moods 
is familiar to him; and dawn no less than 
twilight. One of the most beautiful pass- 
ages in the novels is the description of 
dawn on the Froom meadows when Angel 
Clare is reminded of the Resurrection hour. 
Another almost equally lovely is the pic- 
ture of the woods at the hour of Bath- 
sheba's awakening there. And as a pic- 
ture of the decline of day turn to the de- 
scription of the forest at nightfall in The 
Woodlanders. In the beautiful recent poem 
*' Afterwards" Hardy voices his hope that 
if, when he is gone, men remember him at 
all, it will be as one who noticed the loveli- 
ness of the spring, to whom the hawk and 
the thorn were familiar sights, who strove 
to protect the little creatures of the coun- 
try-side from harm, and who had an eye for 
the mysteries of the full-starred heavens. 



Hardy is wont, in a manner more re- 
cently associated with his disciple Eden 
Phillpotts, to centre his stories around 
some one or other of the trades and occu- 



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149 



Wessex 
trades 



III 



150 


THOMAS HARDY 




pations of Wessex. In Tess we watch the 
life of the Great Dairies: the milking, 
skimming, churning, cheese-making, and 
the minor occupations of the dairy-hands 
such as the charmingly described task of 
uprooting the few strands of garlic that 
were tainting the milk. Later in the same 
book one reads of harsher and less pic- 
turesque work like ''hacking," reed-draw- 
ing, and threshing. Far from the Madding 
Crowd is set amidst the cares and pleasures 
of shepherds : lambing, washing and shear- 
ing, the shearing-supper (an unforgettable 
scene), and the sheep-fair. Bathsheba 
appears at the corn-market, an episode that 
connects this book with The Mayor of 
Casterbridge in which the corn-and-hay 
trade is depicted. Life in the timber and 
orchard districts is the background of The 
Woodlanders; quarriers and stone-sawyers 
appear in The Well-Beloved; furze-cutting 
is the austere and lonely occupation of 
many of the peasants in The Return of the 
Native. The story of The Trumpet-Major 
moves in and around an old flouring-mill. 
The questionable trade of smuggling is 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


151 


amusingly portrayed in ''The Distracted 
Preacher." The doings of the old string 
band (not a trade but formerly an impor- 
tant occupation) forms a large part of the 
theme of Under the Greenwood Tree. 

* * * 

Customs change slowly in Wessex. In 
"The Fiddler of the Reels" Hardy says 
that 1851, the year of the Great Exhibi- 
tion, "formed . . . an extraordinary chron- 
ological frontier" between old ways and 
new. Many of the Southern folk, journey- 
ing up to London, then saw the outer world 
for the first time. From that period on 
old habits began to disappear and new 
ways, the ways of the drab, undifferen- 
tiated, board-school English labourer every- 
where, began to creep in. The dialectical 
peculiarities began to be levelled out and 
many of them are now becoming obsolete. 
The older people who use them, are snubbed 
by the younger generation educated at the 
National Schools. Hardy has commented 
upon these changes in the preface to his 
volume of selections from the poems of 


Wessex 
customs 


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THOMAS HARDY 




William Barnes. But modern ways are 
not yet completely dominant, for many 
tradition customs still linger, "only in a 
metamorphosed or disguised fonn." In 
Who's Who Hardy sets down "old church 
and dance music" among his hobbies or 
recreations, for he takes an affectionate in- 
terest in these memorials of the old times. 
The lovely old custom of the Christmas 
"wakes" is described in detail in Under the 
Greenwood Tree and is the theme of the 
touching poem "The Dead Choir." Allu- 
sions to hymn-books and to the instrttments 
of the players occur constantly. The 
vicar's training of one such choir forms an 
amusing scene in Two on a Tower. Hardy 
speaks often of old hymn-tunes and psalm- 
tunes, notably in the inn scene in The 
Mayor of Casterhridge when Henchard 
forces the singers to perfonn the terrible 
commination psalm. No English writer 
has described the joy of dancing with more 
gusto than Hardy. He speaks of the twist- 
ing of old folk-airs and the doctoring of 
them so that they reappear as new 
music-hall ditties, and of "country jigs, 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



reels, and 'Favorite Quick Steps' of the 
last century — some mutilated remains of 
which even now reappear as nameless 
phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, 
where they are recognized by the curious." 
Instances of such decayed survivals of 
old folk-customs are common in the novels. 
The club-revel or "club-walking" on the 
Tuesday after Whitsunday which forms the 
opening scene of Tess is mentioned several 
times elsewhere by Hardy. It is a folk- 
survival, the ''club" being a degenerate 
form of the old May Day dance. "Frag- 
ments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose 
names have been forgotten," he says in 
The Return of the Native, "seem ... to 
have survived mediaeval doctrine." Two 
chapters in the novel just named form a 
locus classicus for students of folk-drama. 
These contain an account of the Christmas 
Mtimmers'-Play of Saint George as it was 
still acted annually about 1840, Typical 
of the last stages of folk-custom is the way 
in which the party assembled at Mrs. Yeo- 
bright's received the performance: 



153 



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154 


THOMAS HARDY 




The remainder of the play ended. . . . 
Nobody commented, any more than they 
would have commented upon the fact of 
mushrooms coming in autumn or snow- 
drops in spring. They took the piece as 
phlegmatically as did the actors them- 
selves. It was a phase of cheerfulness 
which was, as a matter of course, to be 
passed through every Christmas; and 
there was no more to be said. 

Folk-play is the last stage in the process of 
degeneration from sacrifice through cult. 
It has here been reached.^^ Similar sur- 
vivals that are recorded are the skimming- 
ton or skimmity ridings ("satiric proces- 
sions with effigies") of which a full ac- 
count occurs in The Mayor of Casterhridge 
and to which there is an allusion in the 
poem "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's." 
According to Mr. Sherren a skimmington 
took place in a Dorset village in 1884. In 
another remote district, it may be added, 
a skimmity ride was in progress as late as 
the summer of 1917 when it was broken up 
by the police.i^ This cruel custom seems 
to Jhave arisen in the early years of the 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


155 


seventeenth century as one of the methods 
of deaUng with witches. In earUer in- 
stances a man and woman impersonated 
the couple who were caricatured, whereas 
in Hardy's reproductions of the custom 
effigies are made that grossly satirize the 
imfortunate people. A good example of 
the more prmiitive form may be found 
towards the end of Heywood and Brome's 
Late Lancashire Witches (1634), a play that 
is a mine of superstitions about witch- 
craft. Returning to Hardy, one may 
note the pretty custom of the wedding 
march around the village or hamlet which 
takes place in two of the novels. The sig- 
nal at the outbreak of a fire is the ringing 
of the church bells backwards. When a 
death occurs it is announced by the tolling 
of the bell with a system of changes accord- 
ing to the age and sex of the deceased. 
These two uses of the bells still survive in 
some districts. A barbarous relic of a less 
civiHzed age is the wife-selling episode with 
which The Mayor of Casterbridge begins. 
It has been objected that such an occur- 
rence is too improbable to form the basis of 




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156 


THOMAS HARDY 


Wessex 
folk-lore 


a novel's plot. But Havelock Ellis has 
gathered together many examples of this 
custom^* and J. E. Vaiix has recorded two 
well-authenticated cases in England in the 
nineteenth century. ^^ A still grimmer 
relic of the past is the burial of a suicide at 
the cross-roads with a stake driven through 
his heart, which is the subject of the short 
story of "The Grave at the Handpost." 

* * * 

Many superstitions survived in Wessex 
in Hardy's earlier years and have even yet 
not entirely disappeared. "These smoul- 
dering village beliefs," says Hardy, are 
"sentiments which lurk like moles under- 
neath the visible surface of manners." 
The Wessex novels are a mine for the f olk- 
lorist and Hardy has been cited by many 
such as a recognized authority on the sub- 
ject. Tess and her mother represent the 
contrast between the younger generation 
whose belief has been undermined by edu- 
cation, though by no means obliterated as 
yet, and the elder with its "fast-perishing 
lumber of superstition, folk-lore, dialect. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


157 


and orally transmitted ballads." "Fast- 
perishing" quite probably; but still to be 
found in out-of-the-way districts where 
there is even to-day implicit trust in charms 
as remedies for tooth-ache, St. Vitus's 
dance, and other ills, and where old- 
fashioned farmers still prefer the services 
of a ''charmer" to those of a veterinary 
when their cattle are ill. A collection of 
some of the reHcs of ancient credulity that 
are recorded by Hardy sheds light upon a 
side of his work over which critics have 
passed without detailed comment. 

The best known of these superstitions 
and the one that from the time of Theoc- 
ritus has been most often turned to ac- 
count in imaginative literature is the melt- 
ing of a wax image, shaped to represent an 
enemy, the life of the enemy fading away 
with the melting of the image. The most 
familiar example of this theme in English 
literature is of course Rossetti's Sister 
Helen. References to it occur fairly often 
in the Jacobean drama. ^® The reader may 
like to be reminded of the chaiiii which 
Nance Redferne mutters over the clay 


The waxen 
image 


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158 


THOMAS HARDY 




image, stuck full of pins, of James Device 
in Ains worth's Lancashire Witches, a ro- 
mance founded upon the same documents 
that suggested the theme of their play to 
Thomas Hejrwood and Richard Brome. 
Later in that wild romance the witch causes 
the grave-digger to put in the ground an 
image of the woman she hates, saying 
''Bury it deep, and as it moulders away, 
may she it represents pine and wither." 
The terrific nature of this bit of folk-belief 
appealed to Hardy and he uses it twice. 
When Henchard is experiencing the rapid 
decline of his fortunes he wonders whether 
some one has been shaping an image of him 
and setting it before the fire. The idea is 
used terribly and dramatically in The Re- 
turn of the Native where Susan Nunsuch 
melts the image of Eustacia on the very 
evening of the latter's death. The same 
woman, on an earlier occasion, had pricked 
Eustacia's arm and drawn her blood as a 
means to stop the suspected bewitching of 
her children. Had no blood come it would 
have been proof positive that Eustacia was 
a witch. Thus, a character in Ainsworth's 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


159 


book declares that "your witch should be 
put to every ordeal. She should be 
scratched with pins to draw blood from 
her," etc. And in the poem "A Witch" 
by Hardy's fellow-townsman, William 
Barnes, one reads: 

An' I've a-heard the farmer's wife did try 
To dawk a needle or a pin 
In drough her wold hard wither'd skin, 
An' draw her blood, a-comen by: 
But she could never vetch a drap. 
For pins would ply an' needles snap 
Agean her skin; an' that, in coo'se. 
Did meake the hag bewitch em woo'se. 

Witches and devils are the familiar neigh- 
bors of the Wessex yokels. Dr. Fitzpiers 
in The Woodlanders is charged with having 
sold his soul to the devil — the usual accusa- 
tion brought by the ignorant and the 
credulous against one of superior intellec- 
tual attainments, especially if he is an 
empiricist. The exhausted condition of 
the mare which in reality Fitzpiers had 
used secretly is explained as being due to 
its having been "hag-ridden." The older 




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160 


THOMAS HARDY 




inhabitants of the woodland tell strange 
tales of sights seen in times past, of witches 
black and white. The beautiful Vale of 
Blackmore is said to teem with beliefs in 
''green-spangled fairies that 'wickered' at 
you as you passed." The fact that Barnes 
is comparatively Httle known will excuse 
one for offering part of his chaiiiiing little 
poem "The Veairies" as an illustration of 
this. Long years ago the fairies used to 
come to the narrator's grandfather's house 
where they danced upon the floor around 
the fire. One night they found a keg of 
mead and one fairy drank so much that he 
could not remember the words that had to 
be said to make him small enough to pass 
through the keyhole: 

He got a-dather'd zoo, that after all 
Out t'others went an' left en back behind. 
An' after he'd a-beat about his head 
Agean the keyhole till he were half dead, 
He laid down all along upon the vloor 
Till gramfer, comen down, unlocked the 
door: 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


161 


An' then he zeed en ('twer enough to 

frighten en) 
Bolt out o' door, an' down the road lik' 

Hghtenen. 

In other poems Barnes makes equally de- 
lightful use of these beliefs. 

Hardy touches the borders of the super- 
natural in "The Withered Arm" where 
there is a hint, and a hint only, of a pos- 
sible rationalistic explanation of the in- 
cubus. In the same story Conjuror 
Trendle recommends to the afflicted hero- 
ine that she lay the withered member 
across the neck of a man newly hanged. 
The idea here would seem to be that the 
vitality of the man just dead, passing out 
through the wounded portion of his body, 
will have a restorative effect upon the ail- 
ing Hmb. In former times the same cure 
was often used for skin diseases and for 
epilepsy. The lonely dwelHngs of such 
conjurors are found in various parts of 
Wessex. 

Bodements and omens are looked for by 
the peasantry on all occasions. The 




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162 


THOMAS HARDY 


Omens and 
signs 


breaking of a key or a looking-glass is a 
dreadful sign. A ringing in the left ear or 
the sight of a magpie foreshadows a com- 
ing mtirder. As Tess is returning from her 
sojourn at the Chase a thorn-prick upon 
her chin gives her great concern. After 
the wedding of Tess and Clare, as they are 
departing in the afternoon upon their hon- 
eymoon, the cock crows thrice, and the 
alarmed household endeavor to explain 
away this grim portent by holding that it 
is a mere forecast of change in the weather. 
On several occasions Tess hears the rumble 
of the spectral D'Urberville coach — ^which 
foretells coming disaster. The maidens in 
Under the Greenwood Tree follow the direc- 
tions in the "witch's book" in order to 
catch a glimpse of their future husbands; 
and in The Woodlanders there is a scene of 
wonderful sensuous charm in which the 
young girls of the neighborhood go to the 
forest on Old Midsummer Eve for this pur- 
pose. The future is elsewhere divined by 
means of a Bible and a key (as in Hey- 
wood's Wise Woman of Hogsden) and else- 
where still by looking into the cloudy white 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



163 



of an egg. This last method of "scrying" 
is a substitute for the more usual crystal- 
gazing. A copy of The Compleat Fortune- 
Teller or some other such book was often 
in the possession of peasant families ; Joan 
Durbeyfield stood in such awe of this book 
that she feared to leave it in the house over 
night and had it put in the wood-shed every 
evening. There are many superstitions 
connected with death; in "Interlopers at 
the Knap," for instance, we see the sister, 
after the death of her brother (which hap- 
pens during the night) , slip out of the house 
and passing along the row of bee-hives 
wake each swarm in turn; were that not 
done the bees, too, would die. In the brief 
tale of "An Imaginative Woman" Hardy 
connects folk-beliefs with the possibility, 
admitted by modern science, of pre-natal 
influence upon physical characteristics, and 
turns the idea to the uses of irony. Sim- 
ilar cases are recorded in great number in 
the final volume of Havelock Ellis's Studies 
in the Psychology of Sex. And as an in- 
stance of the venerableness of the belief 
among the English peasantry, the foUow- 



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164 


THOMAS HARDY 


Various 
curious 
beliefs 


ing scrap of dialogue in Lyly's Mother 
Bombie (I, i) may be quoted: 

Memphio: Rascall, doest thou imagine 
thy mistress naught of her body? 

Dromio: No , bu t f antasticall of her mind ; 
and it may be, when this boy was be- 
gotten she thought of a foole, and so 
conceiued a foole. 

Hardy records many superstitions of a 
less sombre sort than those noted in the 
preceding paragraphs. In Jude Vilbert, 
the quack doctor, sells love-philtres dis- 
tilled from the juice of doves' hearts. 
(One recalls that "dust of doves' hearts" 
is listed by Burton among love-potions.^^) 
Vilbert, like Venn the reddleman and the 
nimierous conjurors, is himself a survival 
from the far past. Christian Cantle, the 
"slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight 
fool "of The Return of the Native, had the 
misfortune to be born when there was no 
moon, thus amply confirming the old say- 
ing "No moon, no man." When Farmer 
Crick's cows (in Tess) do not give their 
milk abundantly various explanations are 


III 


BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


165 


offered. *' 'Tis because there's a new hand 
come among us," says one. "I've been 
told that it goes up into their horns at such 
times," a dairy-maid suggests ; but a bright- 
minded fellow refutes this by pointing out 
that the cows whose horns are cut off are 
as ungenerous as the rest. ''Folks," says 
Farmer Crick, ''we must lift up a stave or 
two — that's the only cure for't." Upon 
which "the band of milkers . . . burst into 
melody — ^in purely business-like tones, it is 
true, and with no great spontaneity." 
Apparently the milk then came in satis- 
factory quantities. On another occasion 
the butter will not "come." "Perhaps 
somebody in the house is in love," one 
hand remarks ; and consultation with vari- 
ous neighbouring conjurors is suggested. 
A pleasant interlude in Tess is the tale of 
William Dewy of Mellstock (the same 
person who appears as an old man in 
Under the Greenwood Tree). In his youth 
he channed a bull by playing on his fiddle 
as he ran away from it; but he could not 
manage to climb the fence because to do 
so he had to stop playing, until he hit upon 




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• 



166 


THOMAS HARDY 




the plan of playing the "'Tivity Hymn," 
when the bull, hearing the familiar melody 
and thinking it must be Christmas-Eve. 
knelt down, and before it realized that it 
had been fooled Dewy was safely over the 
fence. The same charming bit of folk- 
belief is employed for a very different pur- 
pose in one of Hardy's most moving poems, 
"The Oxen": 

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. 

"Now they are all on their knees," 
An elder said as we sat in a flock 

By the embers in hearthside ease. 

We pictured the meek mild creatures 
where 

They dwelt in their strawy pen, 
Nor did it occur to one of us there 

To doubt they were kneeling then. 

So fair a fancy few would weave 
In these years! Yet, I feel, 

If someone said on Christmas Eve, 
"Come; see the oxen kneel, 

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb 
Our childhood used to know," 

I should go with him in the gloom, 
Hoping it might be so. 


III. 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



A mediaeval legend analogous to this be- 
lief forms the subject of the poem called 
"The Lost Pyx," which gives one tradi- 
tional explanation of the origin of the 
strange stone pillar at the head of Black- 
more Vale called "Cross-and-Hand," an- 
other explanation of which occurs in Tess. 

Education has not so much rooted out 
these old beliefs as it has hidden them 
away beneath a mantle of shamefacedness 
and pretended scepticism. This fact is 
well illustrated by the conference that 
Henchard has with the conjuror and 
weather-prophet near Casterbridge, whose 
clients feign to consult him merely as a 
whim but who is consoled for the super- 
ficial irony of their manner towards him by 
his confidence in their fundamental belief 
in his supernatural powers. 

The foregoing account of the customs 
and superstitions recorded in the Wessex 
novels must not be permitted to give a false 
impression of the place and prominence 
they occupy therein. Hardy is no mere 
anthropologist or folk-lorist. These quaint 
and curious beliefs are never introduced 



167 



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The effect 
of educa- 
tion on 
these beliefs 



The place 
of folk-lore 
in the 
novels 



III 



168 


THOMAS HARDY 




into the stories for their own sakes alone. 
They are a part of the "atmosphere," of 
the "local colour" (to use two well-worn 
terms at once) of the novels and contribute 
their quota to the total effect much as do 
the descriptions of the natural features of 
the country-side. 


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169 


V 

MEN AND WOMEN: PEASANTS 

The pea,sants who cling to the behefs which 
we have been discussing do not form a 
class completely apart from the other char- 
acters in the Wessex novels, for by almost 
imperceptible gradations, through such 
persons as Oak and Winterborne, the back- 
ground or chorus of yokels is connected 
with the principal characters who are higher 
in the social scale. Nevertheless there are 
traits in the peasantry which differentiate 
that class from the rest. 

Though they possess some qualities in 
common among themselves the rustics are 
often individualized. Hardy has pro- 
tested more than once against the city- 
man's view of the undifferentiated 
" Hodge." He contributed an illuminating 
letter on this and kindred subjects to 
Longman's Magazine, July, 1879 ("The 


The 
peasants 


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THOMAS HARDY 




Dorsetshire Labourer"). In A Pair of 
Blue Eyes he insists that it is only in cities 
that the attrition is so great as to change 
the unit Self into a fraction of the larger 
unit Class. In Tess he remarks that these 
rustics are "beings of many minds, beings 
infinite in difference; some happy, many 
serene, a few depressed, one here or there 
bright even to genius, some stupid, others 
wanton, others austere." The importance 
of these people varies with the social 
strata in which the several stories are 
set. In Under the Greenwood Tree we are 
in the midst of them; in The Woodlanders 
they play a great part; in The Return of 
the Native rather less; in Far from the 
Madding Crowd and still more in The 
Mayor of Casterbridge they serve rather as 
part of the background and as a sort of 
chorus that observes and comments upon 
events; in Tess, save in the dairy-farm 
scenes, the humour associated with them is 
becoming acrid — there is grimness in the 
picture of John Durbe5rfield; in Jude there 
is hardly a trace of interest in them, and 


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171 


with their disappearance goes also the 
humour that accompanied them. 

The Ufe of such men and women is close 
to earth. They live among the sights and 
sounds and smells of the natural world. 
Their being is permeated with them. Con- 
sider the description of Winterborne which 
admirers of Hardy have always delighted 
to quote: 

He looked and smelt like Autumn's very 
brother, his face being sunburnt to 
wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn- 
flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed 
with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with 
the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled 
with pips, and ever3rwhere about him 
that atmosphere of cider which at its 
first return each season has such an in- 
describable fascination for those who 
have been born and bred among the 
orchards. 

One could parallel this passage with others 
showing peasants among their lambs and 
ewes, or cutting furze upon the heath, or 
milking, or threshing, or what you please. 


Their 
closeness 
to earth 


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THOMAS HARDY 




They are part of the landscape. They are 
thoroughly at ease in their world. The 
signal for an assignation is a stone thrown 
into a pool imitating the sound of a plung- 
ing frog. Another is a moth let loose into 
a room to beat itself against the lamp. 
Oak tells the hours by the grand wheel of 
the constellations. He recognizes the signs 
of coming rain. He is alert and efficient 
when confronted with Bathsheba's flatu- 
lent sheep. There is no self -consciousness 
in this knowledge. The peasants lead un- 
speculative Uves close to Nature, never re- 
belHng against Circumstance. If they 
complain at all — and it is only the feeble 
among them that do so — ^it is of small 
physical ills of little moment: Thomas 
Leaf of his lack of brains (of which he is 
rather proud than otherwise), William 
Worm of his deafness, Christian Cantle of 
his cowardice, and so on. Hardy shows no 
concern for their " social condition . ' ' Often 
he seems to be out of sympathy with the 
advance of so-called education, believing 
that the National Schools obliterate more 
of value than they give. He lays no stress 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


173 


upon their poverty; in fact in the article 
referred to above he declares that their 
misery has been much over-estimated. It 
is the rustics in the Wessex novels who are 
happy, for the secret of happiness, as is 
said in The Woodlanders, lies in limiting the 
aspirations. They are quietists without 
being aware of the fact. Not that they 
are necessarily unintelligent. Many are 
shrewd, some witty, nearly all uncon- 
sciously humorous. The humour, as we 
have seen, is merely an exaggeration, 
touched with literary reminiscence and 
artistically justifiable, of qualities to be 
met with in real life. Often of course they 
are not so much humorous as the cause of 
humour in Hardy who juxtaposes their 
primitive manners and quaint conceits to 
the ideas and behavior of more educated 
people. Their humour consists largely in 
comments upon the broad, general experi- 
ences of humanity: birth, and courtship, 
and marriage, and death, and success or 
failure in enterprise. To a great degree 
it depends upon homely perversions of the 
sort of learning that, heard Sunday after 


Their 
humour 


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THOMAS HARDY 


The clergy 


Sunday all their lives, has become part of 
themselves — the moral and devotional ex- 
hortations of their clergymen, the more 
picturesque portions of the Scriptures and 
the Prayer-book, and the good old un- 
sophisticated hymns the staves of which 
they lift with such a good will. 

* * * 

Among those who play a prominent part 
yet are of secondary importance there is 
one class of men who stand apart from the 
rest: the clergy. Hardy's portrayal of 
them, like George Eliot's, has been a sub- 
ject for frequent adverse comment, espe- 
cially during the years when the novels 
were appearing. It is quite incorrect to 
say that he is uniformly hostile towards 
them. Towards the Establishment, vested 
with social, political and intellectual 
prestige, and containing traces of former 
persecuting privilege, he is consistently and 
defensibly hostile. But his individual 
clergymen fall into two well-defined groups. 
On the one hand are the sincere, ardent, 
hard-working believers who exercise an 


III 


BYRN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


175 


energetic, practical, humane influence upon 
their people; on the other hand, the in- 
sincere, generally younger, men who enter 
the church as a means of social and intel 
lectual advance. The elder Mr. Clare is 
portrayed with a gentle sympathy un 
touched by the remotest irony ; his portrait 
is worthy of comparison with those of the 
ministers of the gospel drawn by Chaucer 
and Dryden and Goldsmith. Mr. Raun- 
ham in Desperate Remedies not only gives 
sensible advice to the Grayes but is capable 
of directing the work of salvage at the fire. 
Mr, Maybold in Under the Greenwood Tree 
behaves in a very manly fashion towards 
Fancy Day. Mr. Torkingham in Two on 
a Tower is a sensible person though a little 
in awe of his bishop; it is this latter char- 
acteristic only that is mildly satirized. 
Hardy denies any satiric intent in his por- 
trayal of the Bishop of Melchester in this 
novel; but he has not conquered his pre- 
judices and one cannot but feel that the 
picture is a caricature. But on the whole 
all these clerics must be set off as counter- 
balances against such men as the worldly 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



176 


THOMAS HARDY 




Mr. Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes (a 
prevalent and very human type); Mr. 
Cope in the short story ''For Conscience's 
Sake"; the two elder brothers of Angel 
Clare; and especially the two sons of a 
drunken father in "A Tragedy of Two 
Ambitions." Hardy does not always re- 
main clear-sighted and fair. There is 
angry satire in his portrait of the vicar in 
Tess. And in the powerful short story just 
referred to one of the brothers remarks to 
the other : 

"To succeed in the Church, people must 
believe in you, first of all, as a gentleman, 
secondly as a man of means, thirdly as a 
scholar, fourthly as a preacher, fifthly, 
perhaps, as a Christian." 

This is not only bad art (for it is the writer 
who speaks here through the mouth of a 
character who cannot even be imagined as 
uttering such sentiments) ; it is manifestly 
unjust. In such general indictments of 
the motives that now-a-days draw young 
men into the ministry Hardy recalls and 
exaggerates the opinions of George EHot. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



It is noteworthy, finally, that in several of 
the most important novels there is prac- 
tically no mention of religion or of religious 
usage at all. 

Little attention is paid to the other pro- 
fessional classes. The architects who figure 
so largely in the earlier books have of course 
their interest as individuals, but the fact 
of their profession is of autobiographic, not 
of psychological, interest. Lawyers are 
hardly ever heard of, save incidentally as 
in the divorce proceedings in The Wood- 
landers. Fitzpiers is the only physician 
who plays a prominent part, and he is 
drawn rather as an intellectualist in gen- 
eral than with particular regard to his pro- 
fession. As for the crowds of merchants 
and farmers, their fate depends upon their 
temperament and circumstances far more 
than upon their calling. 



Education, widening their mental hori- 
zon, has entered in greater or less degree 
into the lives and characters of most of the 



177 



Other 
professions 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



178 


THOMAS HARDY 


Hardy's 
women 


leading personages of the novels; and with 
knowledge come sorrow and complexity. 

To understand Hardy's conception of 
women one must relate it to an important 
part of his general metaphysic, premising 
that he himself has indicated that this 
metaphysic is to be regarded as purely 
tentative. The enormous number of mar- 
ital complexities in the novels and short 
stories and poems is due to the connection 
of the sexual relation with his general 
thought. It must be remarked what a 
little part such Balzacian passions as greed 
or ambition play in Hardy's world. They 
are superficial and in a measure conven- 
tional passions, a product of civihzation. 
And in his world we are equally far from 
Meredith's or James's subtle analyses of 
the delicate motives of refined and artificial 
people. The love-instinct, on the con- 
trary, reaches to the core of human nature; 
and the problem of that instinct becomes 
almost an obsession with him. Troubles 
arising out of both regular connections and 
illicit unions are constant. There are at 
least a dozen seductions in the books. To 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


179 


Hardy's credit it must be said that he does 
not mince matters. He had to permit cer- 
tain concessions in the first magazine ver- 
sions of several of the novels, but in their 
final form we meet with frankness and no 
prudery. It is important to consider here 
his views on marriage. At the root of his 
polemics are his sense of the injustice of 
imposing a permanent bond as the penalty 
for a passing desire and his knowledge of 
the numberless instances in which love has 
been stifled by obligation. But two ques- 
tions suggest themselves: Just what rem- 
edy does Hardy propose? And: Does he 
imagine that a mere *' return to Nature" 
would be a practicable solution in the 
modem world? On the whole he seems to 
advocate merely a greater freedom of 
divorce; and the development of sentiment 
during the last thirty years has been in 
line with his ideas. His final opinion is 
well summarized in a postscript to the 
preface to Judc. A marriage, he says, 
"should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes 
a cruelty to either of the parties — being 
then essentially and morally no marriage." 


His views 
on marriage 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



180 


THOMAS HARDY 




He protests elsewhere against marriages of 
convenience, especially between persons of 
very different ages. "The necessity of 
getting life-leased at all costs, a cardinal 
virtue which all good mothers teach," leads 
to such unhappy and unsympathetic unions 
as that depicted in "An Imaginative 
Woman." In another of Life's Little 
Ironies he speaks of the belief of "the 
British parent that a bad marriage with its 
aversions is better than free womanhood 
with its interests, dignity, and leisure." 
Two notes, added in the recent definitive 
edition of his writings, are protests against 
the old de rigtieur ending of a story with a 
marriage and life happy ever after. These 
notes may be found at the close of "The 
Distracted Preacher" and at the point in 
The Return of the Native where Thomasin 
announces her engagement to Venn. Mar- 
riage, he says elsewhere, is not the goal of 
life, but a milestone on the path. Yet it 
does not necessarily bring unhappiness. 
There is tragedy enough in all conscience; 
but it comes from mis-mating, not from 
mating; from accepting as a lasting feeling 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


181 


what in many cases is but a momentary 
impulse. The true solution comes when 
good-fellowship is added to love. "The 
compound feeling," he writes with grave 
beauty towards the close of Far from the 
Madding Crowd, "proves itself the only 
love which is strong as death." Nowhere 
do we find either a sentimentalizing of love 
(as in Scott), or an intellectualizing (as in 
Meredith), or an idealization (as in 
Browning) ; but a fiim acceptance of it for 
what it is — a physical passion, a sexual 
attraction, carrying with it the hope, but 
only the hope, of a permanent bond of 
affection based on common interests and 
common ideas. Hardy is here much more 
in line with the female novelists of the 
nineteenth century than with the male. 
If in the marriage of Fancy Day and Dick 
Dewy and of some other couples, notably 
Grace and Fitzpiers, there are suggestions 
and more than suggestions of coming un- 
happiness, no such clouds overcast the 
marriage of Bathsheba and Oak or that of 
Farfrae and Elizabeth -Jane which was, 
Hardy records, uniformly happy. And 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



182 


THOMAS HARDY 




perhaps it does not bring the matter to too 
personal a close to note that in the verses 
called "A Poet" — and the allusion is un- 
mistakable — Hardy asks that the memory 
of him shall be that "two thoughtful women 
loved him well," 

On the whole, however, Hardy's attitude 
towards women is unfavorable ; his opinion 
of them is bitter. They have many good 
qualities of heart, but they are fickle and 
vain, insincere, conscienceless, and se- 
ductive. Almost all are passionate and 
passion leads invariably to grief. Char- 
lotte Bronte and George Eliot had led the 
way away from the Rowenas and Doras 
and Amelias of earlier fiction. Meredith, 
too, had broken the old bonds, but, as con- 
trasted with Hardy, he had over-intellec- 
tuahzed his women. His revolt from senti- 
mentalism and from "the charity of chiv- 
alry" was in itself an unconscious yielding 
to sentiment. In Hardy there is nothing 
of this. 

It has not hitherto been remarked how 
few children appear in the Wessex novels. 
It is almost a childless world. Even the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


183 


many love-children are either grown-up, or 
play a passive part, or die in infancy. The 
boy who holds Eustacia's hand as a reward 
for the services rendered her is a preco- 
cious youth unconvincingly drawn. The 
wretched son of Jude and Arabella suf- 
fers, among his many other miseries, from 
the responsibility, one is tempted to say, 
of being an allegory. Nowhere is there 
shown such a healthy, noniial relationship 
as that existing between Richmond Roy 
and his son Harry. But Meredith had the 
intimate pleasures of association with his 
son Arthur before their alienation; and 
Hardy has had no children. Is it fanciful 
to find in this strange and great omission 
from Hardy's world one reason for the 
lack of sweetness in the novels? They 
are often tender and almost always sympa- 
thetic; but they are hardly ever sweet. 
The absolute omission, of which something 
has already been said, of all non-essentials 
necessitated the sacrifice of beautiful op- 
portunities. What was Clym's childhood 
with his strong-minded and foiniidable but 
devoted mother? What was Elizabeth- 


A childless 
world 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



184 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

promptings 
of the Will 


Jane's life with her kindly sailor-father 
before she appears at Casterbridge? What, 
even, were the happy hours that Jude and 
Sue must have spent with their babies? 

The omission is the more remarkable in 
that the function of child-bearing is the 
central idea in Hardy's view of women. 
The business of life is to reproduce life; 
existence is for the sake of existence. 
Nature, seeking only to prolong the species, 
has give this function preeminently to 
woman. Hence woman's instinctive as- 
sertion of charm against which the intelli- 
gence of man revolts but to which his in- 
stincts succumb. What has been called 
the "capriciousness" of Hardy's women is 
in reality their immediate and instinctive 
obedience to emotional impulse, without 
the corrective control of the intelligence. 
It is one form through which the All- 
Mover, the Prime Impulse, works, darkly, 
unreasoningly. What in these women seems 
a lack of volition is due to their being 
possessed by the Will. Love, the sexual 
attraction, foniis the chief motive in 
Hardy's tragedies both because its passion- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


185 


ate force brings out the individual in most 
uncontrolled revolt against the social norai 
and because it embodies the conflict of 
reason and intuition. The earlier novels, 
in which these ideas were already implicit, 
were written before Schopenhauer was 
known in England, but the resemblances 
between the later books, notably Jude, and 
the teachings of the Gernian philosopher 
are so close as almost to rule out of con- 
sideration the possibility of their being due 
simply to coincidence. Hardy's women 
are all of one type, differing only in degree. 
They are essentially Cyrenaics. The prin- 
ciple of calculation they are unaware of. 
The happiness of the moment blinds them 
to the hypothetical disaster of the morrow. 
They ask for the intensity of experience in 
the present rather than for the future 
satisfaction that comes from self-control. 
Those who consider Hardy ''voluptuous" 
fail to see that (to borrow Swinburne's 
simile) like a mediaeval preacher, while on 
the one side he places Love on the other he 
places Death. It is the difference in^,de- 
gree of this impulsiveness that makes 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



186 


THOMAS HARDY 




Hardy's women individuals. There are 
some women of the lower social order, liv- 
ing close to Nature and meeting bravely the 
struggle of daily life, who in a measure re- 
ject the attributes of sex and represent, as 
it were, an undifferentiated humanity. 
Thomasin and Marty South are examples 
of this type. There are shades of difference 
between women who are in essentials much 
alike, as between the worldly and disillu- 
sioned Mrs. Charmond and the educated 
but not ignoble Grace, the one out of har- 
mony with her environment, the other 
reaching back towards an accord which 
has been marred, though not as yet de- 
stroyed, by contact with the outer world. 
In some there are approximations to judi 
ciousness and self-control. The determina- 
tion of Bathsheba to manage her posses- 
sions independently gives her a measure of 
such judiciousness. In Eustacia there is a 
force that seeks to compel circumstances 
into accord with the world of her dreams. 
And then there is the gentle bewilderment 
of Tess. And there is the downright ani- 
malism of Arabella. Mr. Dufiin has set 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 

■ 


187 


down in diagrammatic form the relation- 
ship of the leading women with their sev- 
eral lovers, and Mr. Hedgcock gives a list 
of some thirteen women who play fast and 
loose with thirty-three lovers. The ex- 
tremes meet in Jude the Obscure, Ara- 
bella, as we have seen, is the tool of the 
Will-to-Live. She is thus free from the 
prudent reserves that retard though they 
do not successfully control the love-instinct 
in women of more education like Eustacia. 
Sue, suggestions of whose self-control are 
seen in Elizabeth- Jane and Ethelberta, rep- 
resents the modem growth of self-regard- 
fulness and intellectuality as opposed to 
the older complacent obedience to instinct. 
But even Sue breaks down in the end. 

Fundamentally the same qualities, char- 
acteristic of undifferentiated human na- 
ture, are found in Hardy's men as in his 
women, though with a wider distribution 
of self-control and with an at least occa- 
sional triumph of reason over instinct. 
Setting aside the numerous young men 
whose characters are not yet fixed, one 
notes that his men fall roughly into three 


Hardy's 
men 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



188 


THOMAS HARDY 




classes. On the one side are the sensual- 
ists of whom the arch instance is Alec 
D'Urberville, the unabashed rake. Fitz- 
piers, Wilde ve, and Troy belong in this 
group, though each has certain traits that 
partially redeem him: Fitzpiers his in- 
tellectual attainments, Wilde ve (micanly 
though he has lived) the unhesitating cour- 
age of his last moments, Troy a certain 
picturesque dash and touch of romance. 
In Bold wood, Henchard and Farfrae the 
sexual emotion vipsurges through the 
stratum of interest in their professional 
pursuits. On the other side are the rigid 
intellectualists like Knight and Angel Clare 
who err in the reverse direction. The self- 
ishness of this type of man is best illus- 
trated by the character of Swithin St, 
Cleeve, the young astronomer in Two on a 
Tower. Between the two extremes comes 
the Aristotelean mean, the honest middle 
group, the men who are not passion's 
slaves but who subordinate desire to the 
other demands of life, who have the 
power, in Hardy's words, ''of keeping not 
only judgement but emotion suspended in 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


189 


difficult cases." There is of necessity less 
variety in this type than among the sen- 
sualists. These men are Wordsworthian 
in quality. They are able to subdue per- 
sonal aspirations and to regard self-grati 
fication as secondary in importance to their 
task of service. Through service they pay 
homage to the beloved object. Such men 
are John Loveday, Gabriel Oak, Giles 
Winterborne, It is of the last of these that 
Hardy says: ''How little acquirement and 
culture weigh beside sterling personal char- 
acter!" It is in his portrayal of men of 
this stamp that the best evidence lies for 
what has, perhaps paradoxically, been 
called "the optimism of Thomas Hardy." 
Fortuitously or otherwise Life has pro- 
duced beings with courage, resourceful- 
ness, patience, endurance, clear-sighted- 
ness, tenderness, tolerance, forbearance, 
and unselfishness. The admiration lav- 
ished upon them and the elaborate care 
employed in their portrayal are the proper 
answer to the foolish and uncritical opinion 
that Hardy is scornful of human nature. 
Shakespeare, Moliere, Scott, Balzac, 


• 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



190 


THOMAS HARDY 


>i 


Dickens, and in less degree such writers as 
Fielding and Thackeray — each offers us a 
world filled with contrasting types of men 
and women. Their art is expended upon 
the realization of the infinite number of 
minute differences between individuals. 
Hardy, on the contrary, seeks to show how 
closely akin all men are. He thus re- 
duces to a minimum individual differences 
and emphasizes the traits that are possessed 
in common by all. Hence, as compared 
with these older masters and from this 
point of view, his is the merest fragment of 
a world. Th^ eccentricities Of individuals 
are levelled out into a general humanity 
moved by a common basic impulse and 
suffering, each person in his way, from the 
fundamental fact of the tragedy of the con- 
flict of reason and instinct. How severe 
the tragedy, or how merciful the mitiga- 
tion of it, depends in part upon whether 
that impulse be given free rein or be held 
in check. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


191 


VI 

THE POEMS 

Poetry has a way of outlasting prose, and 
though there are still good judges who 
deny to Hardy equal rank as a poet with 
that which he holds as a novelist, though 
his poetry has not yet obtained the uni- 
versal recognition to which it is entitled, 
and though several of the novels have as 
good a chance of "immortality" as any 
fiction of the last half-century, neverthe- 
less the "concise and quintessential ex- 
pression" attained by rhythmic form makes 
it likely that in Hardy's case, as in Mere- 
dith's, the poetry will outlast the prose, 
though Time will do its accustomed win- 
nowing. 

The volume of Wessex Poems was pub- 
lished at a fortunate time. Had verses 
that enunciated clearly the view of life that 
is only implicit in the earlier novels been 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



192 


THOMAS HARDY 




issued at the beginning of Hardy's career, 
they would, in the words of Darwin's illus- 
trious predecessor, have '^ anticipated 
twenty or thirty years of the march of 
honest feeling." They would have met 
with the same reception, or lack of recep- 
tion, that was the lot of The City of Dread- 
ful Night. At the close of the century not 
only was Hardy famous and therefore not 
only were verses of his likely to arouse 
curiosity, but honest feeling was better 
prepared for such poems as "Hap," and 
"Heiress and Architect," and "The Im- 
percepient." For the sake of clearness the 
titles of Hardy's later volumes of mis- 
cellaneous verse are here repeated: Poems 
of the Past and the Present (1901), Timers 
Laughing-Stocks (1909), Satires of Circum- 
stance (1914), and Moments of Vision 
(1917). The reader must also be reminded 
that even before Wessex Poems appeared 
Hardy had laid down the general plan of 
The Dynasts, the first part of which ap- 
peared in 1904 and the third and last in 
1908. Some survey of the short poems may 
precede consideration of the epic-drama. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


193 


It surprised many people when Hardy, a 
novelist of established reputation, branched 
out into a field of work that, so far as the 
public knew, was almost untried. It is not 
surprising, of course, to those who know 
his history. At no time in his career did 
he wholly give over the writing of verse; 
especially remarkable, for example, are the 
'Toems of Travel " written in 1887. Early 
dates are attached to many poems pub- 
lished lately, and below many others one 
finds the legend "From an old note." 
What is extraordinary is that there has 
been no falling-off in power in the suc- 
cessi^^e volumes of meditative, narrative 
and lyrical verse, but that on the contrary 
in his latest volume, published at the age of 
seventy-seven, are to be found some of his 
ripest, most appealing and most char- 
acteristic pieces. The gnomic utterance, 
the compressed expression of a definite 
thought, the clumsiness that comes from 
conscientious grappling with subjects re- 
bellious to form, the intensity of feeling, 
the wistful melancholy alternating with 
harsh irony, the sympathy beneath the 


General 
charac- 
teristics 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



194 



Why were 
such poems 
written? 



Ill 



THOMAS HARDY 



cynicism, the quiet melody underlying the 
ruggedness — these are qualities of the ear- 
liest poems that are present still in the 
latest. 

Why has Hardy written verses that are 
often cynical, satiric, ironic, sinister; often 
despairing; almost always melancholy and 
disillusioned? If, as he says, 

Faiths by which my comrades stand 
Seem fantasies to me, 

were it not better done as others use to 
rest in silence, and to leave, as a very dif- 
ferent poet has counselled, unquestioning 
faith to those who find comfort and sup- 
port therein? The answer is twofold. 
"B.V." phrased it in the proem to The 
City of Dreadful Night: 

Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles 

To show the bitter, old and wrinkled 
truth 

Stripped naked of all" vesture that be- 
guiles, 

False dreams, false hopes, false masks 
and modes of vouth ; 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


195 


Because it gives some sense of power and 

passion 
In helpless impotence to try to fashion 
Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth. 

It is, in other words, in the first place the 
instinct of the artist, seeking expression; 
and, in the second, the feeling that Truth 
for its own sake is to be prized ''though a 
whole celestial Lubberland were the price 
of Apostasy." Huxley speaks in one of 
his letters of the satisfaction derived from 
''the sense of having worked according to 
one's capacity and light, to make clear and 
get rid of cant and shams of all sorts." 
To those whom such work alaims and of- 
fends Hardy answers in the words of Saint 
Jerome: "If an offence come out of the 
truth, better it is that the offence come than 
that the truth be concealed." This is the 
burden of Hardy's dignified sonnet "To a 
Lady, Offended by a Book of the Writer's." 
And the thought often occurs that the poet 
and those who think like him are but the 
precursors towards a point of view that will 
be ever more generally approached as time 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



196 


THOMAS HARDY 




goes on. His sense of the toughness of the 
battle in this righteous cause is voiced in 
the verses written in Gibbon's garden at 
Lausanne : 

A spirit seems to pass, 
Formal in pose, but grave withal and 

grand: 
He contemplates a writing in his 
hand, 
And far lamps fleck him through the thin 
acacias. 

Anon the leaves are closed, 
With ''It is finished!" And at the 

alley's end 
He turns, and when on me his 
glances bend 
As from the Past comes speech — small, 
muted, yet composed. 

"How fares the Truth now? — 
111? 
— Do pens but slily further her ad- 
vance? 
May one not speed her but in phrase 
askance? 
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Rever- 
end still? 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


197 


"Still rule those minds on earth 
At whom sage Milton's wormwood 

words were hurled: 
'Truth like a bastard comes into the 
world 
Never without ill-fame to him who gives 
her birth'?" 

Hardy is not didactic; he has no desire 
to force opinions upon others; he puts for- 
ward a series of personal impressions, set 
down at different times, under different 
circumstances, and in widely contrasting 
moods. Like Thomson, he writes, not for 
the young, nor for those who grow fat 
among the shows of life, nor for 

. .pious spirits with a God abo^^e them 
To sanctify and glorify and love them; 

and only in rare moments for "sages who 
foresee a heaven on earth." "None un- 
initiate" will comprehend. Hence his par- 
ticular appeal to the type of mind that has 
been affected by the determinism so rife 
during the closing years of the nineteenth 
century. The value for humanity at large 


His 

audience 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



198 


THOMAS HARDY 


His 
range 


lies in this: that Hardy's poetry moots 
questions generally put beyond discussion, 
that it probes into conventions, that it 
stimulates to a new estimation of old stand- 
ards and symbols and formulas. It has, 
of course, merits of another order, for it 
stirs the emotions while it quickens the 
intellect, else it would not be great verse. 

Hardy's hope was that the poems "in 
dramatic, ballad, and narrative form should 
include most of the cardinal situations in 
social and public life, and those in lyric 
form a round of emotional experiences of 
some completeness." But he is fully aware 
of "the little done, the undone vast," and 
in the poetry that he has composed, though 
its range is not so narrow as some critics 
contend, he by no means covers all the 
cardinal situations of life. Rather he 
tends to return often to one or another of 
a few particular situations, viewing them 
now from one angle and now from another. 

The scene of most of the short poems is 
laid in Wessex and the characters are often 
Wessex peasantry. But the application is 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



general. In the essay on "The Profitable 
Reading of Fiction" he has written: 

All persons who have thoughtfully com- 
pared class with class . . . are con- 
vinced that education has as yet but little 
broken or modified the waves of human 
impulse on which deeds and words de- 
pend. So that in the portraiture of 
scenes in any way emotional or dramatic 
— the highest province of fiction — the 
peer and the peasant stand on much the 
same level. 

This is equally true of narrative poetry. 
Accordingly universal human nature is 
portrayed in the particular guise of Wessex 
life. Some of the ballads and narrative 
pieces are cheerful in tone, occasionally 
quite rollicking: ''The Bride-Night Fire," 
for example (one of the few poems, by the 
way, written in dialect), or ''At Caster- 
bridge Fair," or "The Homecoming" with 
its unexpectedly hopeful ending develop- 
ing out of the dismal setting. But many 
others are pathetic or tragic, and of these a 
large inumber, as one would expect, deal 



199 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



The com- 
edy and 
tragedy of 
marriage 



III 



200 


THOMAS HARDY 




with love-entanglements and marital diffi- 
culties. "The Burghers" suggests the 
situation of Sue Bridehead and Phillotson, 
for it is the tale of a husband who not only- 
spares his unfaithful wife but allows her to 
leave him for her lover. The wife in "The 
Dame of Athelhall" repents of her rashness 
in running away from her husband with her 
lover and returns home secretly, only to 
overhear her husband congratulating him- 
self on being rid of her. Irony of a lighter 
sort is used in "The Curate's Kindness," 
an amtising piece, the kindness being the 
curate's intercession with the workhouse 
authorities on behalf of an old couple, that 
they might live together instead of being 
placed in different wards; the irony being 
that the old man's hope which had recon- 
ciled him to the shame of the workhouse 
had been that there he would be separated 
from the forty years' burden of his wife's 
company. A husband's temperament, the 
contrary of that portrayed in "The Burgh- 
ers," is shown in the grim piece called "A 
Conversation at Dawn." A few poems — 
"The Duel," "The Dark-Eyed Gentle- 


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201 


man," and "One Ralph Blossom Solilo- 
quizes," for example — support the state- 
ment that Hardy is moved to cheerfulness 
only by "the triumphant indulgence in 
sexual desire." The cynicism of some 
pieces is so dark as to overreach itself and 
touch on the farcical, as in many of the 
"Satires of Circumstance," in "The 
Statue of Liberty," and in the horrid verses 
that begin "Ah, are you digging on my 
grave?" In one such piece it is told how 
an admirer of a great preacher peeps into 
the vestry-room after the service and sees 
him re-enacting before the mirror the ges- 
tures that had so moved his congregation; 
in another, a lover, returning for his for- 
gotten walking-stick, overhears his sweet- 
heart berating her mother ferociously; in 
still another a stranger newly come to town 
overhears a company in a bar-room telling 
anecdotes of the past disreputable life of 
the woman, well known in that locality, 
whom he has just married. Such things 
as these — reluctant though one is to say it 
in a book that is based on reverence and 
admiration of Hardy — are cheap and un- 


Cynicism 


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202 


THOMAS HARDY 


Love- 
poems 


worthy of a great poet. But by contrast 
they reveal not only those qualities in which 
his genuine merit rests but also the qual- 
ities of great poetry, which never debases 
and sneers at human nature but which 
exalts and uplifts. To offset these cynical 
verses there are, fortunately, many others ; 
passionate lyrics and meditative pieces that 
exhibit a deep realization of the lastingness 
and loyalty of love: ''Her Immortality" 
and ''Her Death and After" in Wessex 
Poems, or "The Clock-Winder" in Hardy's 
latest collection. This last poem, which 
illustrates his terseness, instinct for "atmos- 
phere," halting music, and deep feehng, 
may be quoted. 

It is dark as a cave, 
Or a vault in the nave 
When the iron door 
Is closed and the floor 
Of the church relaid 
With trowel and spade. 

But the parish-clerk 
Cares not for the dark 
As he winds in the tower 
At the regular hour 


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203 


The rheumatic clock. 
Whose dilatory knock 
You can hear when praying 
At the day's decaying, 
Or at any lone while 
From a pew in the aisle. 

Up, up from the ground 
Around and around 
In the turret stair 
He clambers, to where 
The machinery is, 
With its tick, click, v/hizz, 
Deliberately measuring 
Each day to its end 
That mortal men spend 
In sorrowing and pleasuring. 
Nightly thus does he climb 
To the trackway of Time. 

Him I followed one night 
To this place without light. 
And, ere I spoke, heard 
Him say, word by word, 
At the end of his winding, 
The darkness unminding: — 

"vSo I wipe out one more, 
My Dear, of the sore 




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THOMAS HARDY 




Sad days that still be. 
Like a drying Dead Sea, 
Between you and me!" 

Who she was no man knew : 
He had long borne him blind 
To all womankind; 
And was ever one who 
Kept his past out of view. 

A like sense of the value of human kindli- 
ness is found in many poems: ''A Plaint 
to Man," "In a Wood" (where such kind- 
liness is contrasted with the cruelty of 
Nature), and in that most beautiful of all 
Hardy's lyrics, "To Meet or Otherwise": 

Whether to sally and see thee, girl of 
my dreams, 

Or whether to stay 
And see thee not! How vast the dif- 
ference seems 

Of Yea from Nay 
Just now. Yet this same sun wijl 
slant its beams 

At no far day 
On both our mounds, and then what will 
the difference weigh ! 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and 
make 

The most I can 
Of what remains to us amid this brake 

Cimmerian 
Through which we grope, and from 
whose thorns we ache, 

While still we scan 
Round our frail, faltering progress for 
some path or plan. 

By briefest meeting something sure is 
won; 

It will have been : 
Nor God norDaemon can undo the done, 

Unsight the seen, 
Make muted music be as unbegun, 
Though things terrene 
Groan in their bondage till oblivion 
supervene. 

So, to the one long-sweeping symphony 

From times remote 
Till now, of human tenderness, shall we 

Supply one note. 
Small and untraced, yet that will ever be 
Somewhere afloat 
Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life's 
antidote. 



205 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



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THOMAS HARDY 


War 
poems 


The harshness — one is tempted to say the 
hideousness and repulsiveness — of such 
poems as *'The Newcomer's Wife," "The 
Rival," The Statue of Liberty," and "The 
Dead and the Living" must not blind one 
to the fact that these things are transcripts 
from life where such things are possible or 
to the existence of other poems such as 
the two just quoted that present a con- 
trasting view of things. 

Two closely allied groups of poems have 
a particular interest now. These are the 
verses inspired by the Boer War and those 
concerning the Great War of 1914-1918. 
In the earlier series there is not a sign of 
the jingoism that found its most charac- 
teristic expression in Kipling's poems or of 
that extravagant denunciation of the Boers 
that disgraced Swinburne. On the other 
hand there are no protests against the 
South African excursion of British Imperi- 
alism such as vSir William Watson and 
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt voiced in verse. 
Hardy's interest is not in rival policies and 
conflicting claims. He expresses the pathos 
of parting; the irony of the arrival of 


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207 


letters home after the news has been re- 
ceived of their writer's death; the loneli- 
ness of a northerner's grave under the 
southern stars; the joy of re-union. The 
foul anachronism of War "in this late age 
of thought and pact and code" is de- 
nounced, and he sees as a hopeful sign that 
the old view of War as a romantic adven- 
ture is dying out. ''The Sick Battle-God " 
is an impressive rendering of this theme. 
In the later series the very uncharacteristic 
confidence in the perfect justice of Eng- 
land's cause suggests that Hardy may have 
been pressed into the propaganda service; 
but there is still a prevailing sense of the 
pathos of the break-down of efforts towards 
international goodwill. In the sonnet 
called "The Pity of It" he tells how he 
walked through Wessex lanes and heard 
"man}'- an ancient word of local lineage" 
like "Thu bist," "Er war," "Ich woll"; 
and he curses those, whoever they be, who 
separated kin-folk, kin-tongued. Some of 
these poems of the war are obviously 
merely occasional; others are as charac- 
teristic of Hardy as any he has ever com- 




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208 


THOMAS HARDY 




posed. "In Time of 'The Breaking of 
Nations,'" for example, expresses the idea 
so frequently in his mind of the contrast 
between the apparently and the really 
great, between war's annals and falling 
dynasties, and the man at the plough, and 
the maiden and her lover who wander 
whispering by. The very powerful "Quid 
hie agis?" presents the poet's personal re- 
action to the conflict. His final judgement 
upon the world-upheaval is heard in "The 
Blow": 

That no man schemed it is my hope — • 
Yea,. that it fell by will and scope 

Of That Which some enthrone, 
And for whose meaning myriads grope. 

For I would not that of my kind 
There should, of his unbiassed mind, 

Have been one known 
Who such a stroke could have designed; 

Since it would augur works and ways 
Beneath the lowest that man assays 

To have hurled that stone 
Into the sunshine of our days ! 


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209 


And if it prove that no man did, 
And that the Inscrutable, the Hid. 

Was cause alone 
Of this foul crash our lives amid, 

I'll go in due time, and forget 

In some deep graveyard's oubliette 

The thing whereof I groan, 
And cease from troubling; thankful yet 

Time's finger should have stretched to 

show 
No aimful author's was the blow 

That swept us prone. 
But the Immanent Doer's That does not 

know. 

Which in some age unguessed of us 
May lift Its blinding incubus, 

And see. and own: 
**It grieves me I did thus and thus!" 

With that practical meliorism which is the 
paradox of his philosophy Hardy looks for- 
ward to an era of international under- 
standing. 

The series of "Poems of Travel" and the 
scattered elegies and memorial poems on 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


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210 


THOMAS HARDY 


Poems 
of travel 


various poets are good examples of certain 
qualities of Hardy's verse. vSince Byron 
invented the form with Childe Harold there 
have been innumerable poems of places. 
Hardy has accomplished something in the 
same order of subject-matter yet quite 
unlike other poems of the sort. This 
group of poems well shows how fertile 
Hardy is in ideas, how he has never had 
to cast around for themes as Tennyson so 
obviously did. He does not ''sing but as 
the linnet sings" but because he has some- 
thing definite to say, a clear-cut thought to 
express in rhythmic form. In the old 
theatre at Fiesole a child brings him an 
ancient coin; straightway he recognizes 
that he has discovered others of like stamp 
in Dorsetshire; and the vast panorama of 
European history and "the power, the 
pride, the reach of perished Rome" flash 
upon his mind. "At the Pyramid of 
Cestius" contrasts the seeming importance 
with the real importance of the Roman 
whose deeds are all forgotten but whose 
monument now serves to beckon pilgrim 
feet to the tombs of Shelley and Keats. In 


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211 


"Shelley's Skylark" one finds Hardy's 
favorite thought of the contrast between 
humble causes and often great effects, for 
somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leghorn 
where he writes there lies "a tiny pinch of 
priceless dust" which is all that remains of 
the lark that inspired Shelley to win "ec- 
static heights in thought and rhyme." 
Other poems on poets are nearer to the 
fonnal elegy. One is the exceptionally 
beautiful elegy on Swinburne called "A 
Singer Asleep," an example of that sort of 
laudatory criticism in verse with which 
Swinburne himself so often experimented 
and of which Sir William Watson is the 
acknowledged master. It is remarkable 
for its apt appreciation of the poet's tem- 
perament and particularly for its remin- 
iscences of the stoiiiiy reception of the 
Poems and Ballads: 

It was as though a garland of red roses 
Had fallen about the hood of some smug 

nun 
When irresponsibly dropped as from the 

sun. 


Elegies 


A,N D MONOGRAPHS 


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212 


THOMAS HARDY 




In fulth of numbers freaked with musical 

closes, 
Upon Victoria's formal middle time 

His leaves of rhythm and rhyme. 

that far morning of a summer day 
When, down a terraced street whose 

pavements lay 
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, 

1 walked and read with a quick, glad sur- 

prise 

New words in classic guise, — 

The passionate pages of his earlier years, 
Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, 

kisses, tears; 
Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel 

who 
Blew them not naively, but as one who 

knew 

Full well why thus he blew. 

The last three lines are a sharp and exact 
estimate of Swinburne's mood in 1866. 

The latest written of this group of elegiac 
poems is ''To Shakespeare After Three 
Hundred Years." A comparison of this 
poem with the other tributes gathered to- 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


213 


gether in the tercentenary volume of hom- 
age to Shakespeare brings out strikingly 
the originality of Hardy's genius. He ap- 
proaches even so well-worn a theme from 
an angle that demonstrates his idiosyn- 
crasy. The motive is once more the con- 
trast between the apparent and the real 
significance of human endeavour. What 
did Shakespeare's fellow-citizens know of 
his greatness? Hardy pictures two Strat- 
ford men chatting together on the day of 
his death: 

"Ffaith, few knew him much here, save 
by word, 

He having elsewhere led his busier hfe; 

Though to be sure he left with us his 
wife." 

—"Ah, one of the tradesmen's sons, I 
now recall . . . 

Witty, I've heard. . . . 

We did not know him. . . . Well, good- 
day. 

Death comes to all." 

Many of Hardy's poems are broodings 
upon the coming on of age, at times wist- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


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214 


THOMAS HARDY 


Old age 
Death 


ful, at times cynical. The contrast between 
the passion of- youth and the faint relics of 
an old fire is what gives such extraordinary 
and pathetic quality to the amazing self- 
revelatory poems on his wife's death. 
Other such pieces are ''The Two Rosa- 
linds," "The Revisitation," "Middle-Age 
Enthusiasms," and "Autumn in King's 
Hintock Park." Many poems are medita- 
tions upon the various aspects of death. 
Some of these pieces, as would be expected, 
are among Hardy's most distinguished 
achievements in verse. The early poem 
"Heiress and Architect" puts, as we have 
seen, into allegorical form the universal ex- 
perience of disillusion and decline and 
death. But he muses not only upon the 
inevitability of death; he sees its dignity. 
In a Casterbridge church pew are carved 
the initials of three captains who went to 
the wars, only one of whom returned. For 
a moment the survivor felt triumphant in 
the thought that only he had lived: 

Yet saw he something in the lives 
Of those who'd ceased to live 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


215 


That sphered them with a majesty 
Which living failed to give. 

Transcendent triumph in return 

No longer lit his brain: 
Transcendence rayed the distant urn 

Where slept the fallen twain. 

And with its dignity its repose: lieta no, 
ma sicura. "Jubilate" and "While Draw- 
ing in a Churchyard" both tell of the ex- 
periences of- living persons who become 
aware of the contentment of the dead. In 
the former weird poem it is told how the 
snow in a churchyard becomes transparent 
one night and a chance wanderer overhead 
sees the dead below, foreshortened as 
though he watched a stage from the gallery. 
They are stepping a stately dance, singing 
meanwhile: "We are out of it all! — yea, in 
Little-Ease cramped no more!" In the 
other piece the yew tree is heard com- 
menting upon the error of the living in 
misjudging the lot of those "whom kindly 
earth secludes from view": 


- 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


Ill 



216 


THOMAS HARDY 




"They ride their diurnal round 
Each day-span's sum of hours 
In peerless ease, without jolt or bound 
Or ache like ours. ... 

*' 'Now set among the wise,' 
They say: 'Enlarged in scope, 
That no god trumpet us to rise 
We truly hope.' " 

The same motive is employed very touch- 
ingly in "Friends Beyond," a poem in mem- 
ory of Wessex men of Hardy's youth-time. 
The only tragedy that can touch the dead, 
he says in another mood, is their defense- 
lessness under misrepresentation. He 
hears the "Spectres That Grieve": 

"We are among the few death sets not 
free, 

The hurt, misrepresented names, who 
come 

At each year's brink, and cry to His- 
tory 

To do them justice, or go past them 
dumb." 

"Go past them dumb" — that is the fate 
that awaits all but the greatest of men. 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


217 


It is "The Second Death." In the poem 
of that title, in "The To-Be-Forgotten," in 
"His Immortality," and in the beautiful 
verses "Her Immortality" Hardy applies 
to ordinary humanity the cold consolation 
offered by the Positivists, the promise of 
life "on lips of other men." The bereaved 
lover, wandering through the meads, comes 
to the place where he had seen his Beloved 
for the last time, and there comes to him 
there a vision of her, and in utter grief he 
cries that he will kill himself and join her 
ghost. But she dissuades him, saying: 

"A Shade but in its mindful ones 
Has immortality; 
By living, me you keep alive, 
By dying you slay me." 

The lover dismisses his distaste for life and 
promises to guard himself from harms in 
order that her immortality in his memory 
may endure. But his grief grows with the 
passage of years, for he knows that when 
he dies the second death will come to his 
Beloved. 

Other poems connected by definite lines 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


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218 


THOMAS HARDY 


other 
groups 

Summary 


of thought might be grouped together. 
There are those of nature-description; 
poems of despair; poems in which there are 
traces of a strange hopefulness ; many that 
present aspects of the Will that moves the 
universe; many that may be described as 
Cosmic Questionings. To leave them aside 
here is to risk giving a false impression of 
the range of Hardy's genius and poetic 
thought; but they may all be best con- 
sidered in our final chapter as illustrations 
of Hardy's tentative metaphysic. 

* * * 

What then, in sum, weighing the qual- 
ities of these miscellaneous short poems, 
may one say in support of the contention 
that Hardy must be reckoned among the 
great English poets? In the first place, 
though in his earlier poems there are some 
pieces (notably those in the sonnet form) 
that are obviously felicitous echoes of 
Shakespearean ideas and phraseology, his 
work is from first to last bound fiiiiily to- 
gether as the product of one strong mind, 
independent in style and thought. In the 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


219 


earliest poems there are anticipations of 
the latest. This is not to say that Hardy 
has stood still. The development has been 
from the particular to the universal. His 
poetry shows abundantly the ability to 
sense "the abiding in the transient," the 
universal import of matters that on the face 
of them are of mere individual significance, 
the applicability to all men of personal 
experiences. Just as in many passages in 
the novels a curtain seems to rise for an 
instant and we see the vastness of things 
encompassing the human actors, so in the 
poems one finds very often a suggestion of 
larger issues than those that appear on the 
surface. The saddening thought that it 
was only by hap that the lover took the 
path that led him to meet his love, and 
that he might just as well have gone an- 
other way, suggests humanity enslaved to 
chance whether for happiness or for dis- 
tress. The meeting with the "girl of my 
dreams" (in the poem quoted above) sug- 
gests the general "symphony of human 
tenderness " to which that meeting supplies 
one note. This poetry is impersonal in the 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


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220 


THOMAS HARDY 


^ 


sense that the issues involved are larger 
than personality; it is immensely personal 
in the impression it makes of profound emo- 
tion behind it. The sorrow, the anger, the 
cynicism, the despair, the faint flickering 
hope are Hardy's own; but they are more. 
Humanity itself is heard piping in fields and 
groves its solitary anguish. When we read 
these voicings of the pathos of unbelief, or 
of the lost enthusiasms of youth, or of the 
fading memories of the dead, or of the irony 
of the conflict between purposes and re- 
sults, we mourn, not for the poet only who 
has experienced them, but for ourselves. 
What he offers is something besides tech- 
nical mastery of verse or profundity of 
thought. The something further is in our- 
selves. Now from one facet and now from 
another he reflects the sorrow a^d hope of 
the ages. In quintessential form he voices 
human experience. Whether we accept the 
implications which he himself draws there- 
from is not his concern; unlike nearly all 
his contemporaries he is not didactic. The 
'' broken arc" may present to some minds 
the promise of the "perfect round" in an- 


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221 


other sphere of existence. Other minds 
may see with Hardy the quandary in which 
humanity labors. It is not the anger or 
the despair or the consolation of one Self 
that matters. Let each individual acqui- 
esce or rebel according to his reaction to 
Circumstance. The Fact remains. It is 
this sense of the Fact that dominates 
Hardy's thought. Wordsworth, Shelley, 
Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, 
Meredith — each presses upon us his solu- 
tion of life; and each solution is satisfac- 
tory to some minds, rejected by others. 
Hardy does nothing of the kind. What 
he gives is a clear-sighted, determined fac- 
ing and examination of the worst con- 
tingencies as well as of the best in the 
human condition. As in the novels, he 
poses questions, he confronts problems, he 
opens up new avenues of thought. He 
faces Fact; and not the separate isolated 
fact alone. Each experience is part of a 
larger one, in broadening circles till it em- 
braces the Infinite. Thus are the Past and 
Present linked together, the meanest in- 
sect with the farthest star. Thus is a 




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222 


THOMAS HARDY 


The 

Dynasts 


stellar gauge given wherewith to measure 
the place and pretensions of humanity. 
The Self — and this is the more remarkable 
because of the passionate practical indi- 
viduaUsm of the novels — is made subor- 
dinate to the Whole; the particular parcels 
of the Will are seen as portions of Its Im- 
manence. 

* * * 

Turning now to The Dynasts, one must 
premise that the epic-drama is so charged 
with the full weight of Hardy's metaphysic 
that consideration of its philosophy must 
be postponed to the next and final chapter 
and that here we are concerned with it as 
a dramatic poem, a chronicle play on an 
enonnous scale. Some years before he 
began the drama Hardy explained to the 
pubUc why he did not attempt to write 
plays. But there is nothing surprising 
in the fact that at length he turned to that 
medium. Every considerable poet of the 
nineteenth century yielded at one time or 
another and to a greater or less extent to 
the lure of the drama. Moreover there 


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BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 



was always a kind of dramatic quality in 
Hardy's genius, as may be seen in the way 
in which his stories can be resolved into a 
succession of firmly articulated scenes. 

It was said earlier in this study that the 
period of the Napoleonic Wars stamped a 
deep impression upon the memories of the 
people of Southern England and that Hardy 
grew up among relics and stories of that 
time. A group of short poems purposely 
left unconsidered in the previous section 
of this chapter deals with Napoleonic 
themes. Of these pieces perhaps the most 
striking is "The Peasant's Confession." 
It is in the form of a dramatic monologue, 
a form which may be regarded as the most 
typical genre contributed by the Victorian 
period to poetry. A dying peasant is 
imagined as telling the real circumstances 
of Grouchy's failure to keep Bliicher away 
from Wellington according to the orders 
sent him by Napoleon before Waterloo. 
The tale is of course purely fanciful but it 
illustrates again Hardy's idea of the great 
consequences that often flow from insig- 
nificant motives, for the peasant who 



223 



The attrac- 
tion of the 
Napoleonic 
theme for 
Hardy 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



224 


THOMAS HARDY 




guided the officer carrying Napoleon's dis- 
patch learned from him that if Grouchy- 
met Bliicher the resultant battle would be 
fought over his own f aim and to prevent its 
ruin he purposely misdirected the officer. 
Another poem, "Leipzig," is a narrative of 
the Battle of the Nations by a veteran of 
Geiman descent living in Wessex. Several 
stanzas of this piece were afterwards in- 
troduced into corresponding scenes of The 
Dynasts. "The Alaim" is a tale founded 
on the rumor of Napoleon's successful land- 
ing on the Wessex coast, a report that is 
also introduced into The Trumpet-Major 
and into a very vivid scene in The Dynasts. 
The short story of "A Tradition of 1804" 
tells of a shepherd who saw Napoleon and 
some of his staff land one night on the 
English coast to choose a fit landing place 
for the army that was in preparation across 
the Channel. The novel just named was 
Hardy's first considerable imaginative 
treatment of the period. He has himself 
stated that on completing it he felt that he 
had touched only the fringes of the great 
subject. A foot-note in The Dynasts on the 


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POET AND NOVELIST 


225 


location in Brussels of the hall where the 
ball before Waterloo was held reveals the 
fact that as long ago as the seventies 
Hardy was an "enthusiast" on the subject 
of the Wars'; and it has been stated by Mr. 
Gosse that ''an old Note-book," dating 
also from the seventies, exists which con- 
tains a rough sketch of the plan of the epic- 
drama. In the preface to The Dynasts 
Hardy says that one motive for writing it 
was his conviction that England's share in 
the struggle had not been sufficiently em- 
phasized in previous imaginative render- 
ings of the theme. But back of any such 
patriotic motive and back of his life-long 
interest in the period was undoubtedly his 
chief purpose: the choice of the largest 
possible theatre of action whereon to ex- 
hibit all men in the grip of Circumstance, 
those on the topmost heights of human 
glory along with the peasants of the ob- 
scurest Wessex hamlet. The Dynasts thus 
illustrates explicitly and on the largest pos- 
sible scale the deterministic philosophy in- 
herent in the later novels. While entirely 
independent of them and to be judged for 




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THOMAS HARDY 


Sources of 

The 

Dynasts 


itself alone, it elaborates many hints and 
suggestions in the novels and shorter poems. 
Certain admirable scenes connect it with 
Wessex. It owes a good deal to the chron- 
icle play of Elizabethan England; a good 
deal to Meredith's interpretation of Na- 
poleon's character in the *'Odes in Con- 
tribution to the Song of French History"; 
something to Stendhal; something to 
Hugo; something to Tolstoy's War and 
Peace; much to Faust; and a vast amount 
to patient study of contemporary source- 
material and of the researches of special- 
ists. In the scene of the burial of Sir John 
Moore, Hardy successfully challenges com- 
parison with one of the most popular of all 
English poems; in the scene of the Duchess 
of Richmond's ball, with Byron and 
Thackeray, to say nothing of Charles 
O^Mally. This book, however, is not a 
suitable place for quellenstudien. But 
though its antecedents can be traced out 
with some distinctness, The Dynasts re- 
mains a thing apart from other works of 
literature, a new and successful experi- 
ment and departure. The first instalment 


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POET AND NOVELIST 



was greeted with mingled praise and doubt ; 
but from the time of the appearance of 
Part Three it has grown in reputation and 
is now held by all good judges to be the 
greatest work of literature produced dur- 
ing this generation, grand in scope, pro- 
found in thought, sure and subtle in grasp. 
The historic period covered by The Dy- 
nasts is ten years: from Napoleon's corona- 
tion at Milan and the renewal of the war 
in 1805 to his final defeat at Waterloo. 
The first part is concerned mainly with 
England's checking of Napoleon at Trafal- 
gar and the Emperor's triumphant course 
upon the Continent to the climax of Auster- 
litz. The second presents the overthrow 
and humiliation of Prussia, the develop- 
ment of the Peninsular Campaign, and the 
efforts of Napoleon to establish his dynasty 
firmly upon the throne of France through 
the divorce of Josephine and the marriage 
to Maria Louisa of Austria. The third 
part exhibits the Russian campaign and 
disaster, the battle of Leipzig, Napoleon's 
first abdication, the Congress of Vienna, the 
escape from Elba, and the final campaign 



227 



The general 
plan of the 
epic-drama 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



228 


THOMAS HARDY 




of Waterloo. The scenes of each part are 
thus grouped around a few outstanding 
events: Trafalgar and AusterUtz; Jena. 
Wagram, the Peninsular Campaign, and 
the divorce of Josephine; Moscow, Leipzig, 
Elba, and Waterloo. The reaction of ordi- 
nary life, in high and low degree, to these 
stupendous activities is shown in a great 
variety of scenes in London, Paris, Madrid, 
Berlin, Moscow — and Wessex. The do- 
mestic troubles and intrigues of Napoleon, 
of the Queen of Spain, and of the Prince 
Regent; the private conferences and bur- 
dens of ministers of state; the *'grim 
romance of war" as experienced by the 
private soldier and by the stragglers be- 
hind the armies; and the faint, confused 
reflex of far-off events that comes to the 
Wessex peasantry are all portrayed. The 
action at times descends to the point of 
view of some Parisian salon or London 
ball-room or theatre, or Parliamentary de- 
bate, or wretched hut in which straggling 
soldiers find shelter, or metropolitan street 
in which stodgy citizens congregate, or re- 
mote Wessex heath where beacon-keepers 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


229 


hold their watch. And again the action 
soars aloft to the *' Over-World" whence 
all Europe can be surveyed, stretched out 
in an insignificance whereon whole armies 
move like crawling worms and individuals 
of greatest moment, humanly speaking, 
are reduced to meanest humility. 

The various scenes differ as markedly in 
their interest as in their method of pre- 
sentation. It has been said by some critics 
that the parliamentary debates and dip- 
lomatic discussions are dull — but is not 
that true of such debates and discussions in 
actuality? Again it has been said that 
the battle-scenes are over-numerous, one 
crowding upon the other, too unrelieved in 
horror — who living between 1805 and 1815 
would have denied that such was the 
reality of war? As in the novels, so in The 
Dynasts it is easy to perceive where Hardy 
is not fired by his subject and is the con- 
scientious workman rather than the in- 
spired poet. But without exception he 
rises magnificently to the great occasions 
that his theme so frequently presents. 
The death of Nelson and the battle of 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



230 


THOMAS HARDY 


' 


Austerlitz; the interview between Napo- 
leon and the Queen of Prussia when he 
gives her the rose in Heu of Magdeburg; 
the retreat to Coruna and the burial of Sir 
John Moore; the announcement to Jo- 
sephine of the planned divorce; the burn- 
ing of Moscow; Leipzig; and the entire 
group of scenes that depict the battle of 
Waterloo — all are incomparably vivid, 
grasping alike the largest implications and 
the most minute details of the events. Yet 
quite as memorable are many of the scenes 
that present side-issues of the Clash -of 
Peoples. One may call to mind the alarm 
in Wessex over the rumoured landing of the 
French and that other Wessex scene of the 
burning of Napoleon's effigy; the com- 
ments of the. London citizens with which 
the Trafalgar act closes (here Hardy intro- 
duces the grim tradition of the "broach- 
ing" of the cask in which Nelson's body 
was brought home); the squalid huts 
wherein lie deserters from Wellington's 
army in Spain; the scene depicting the in- 
sane George the Third in the care of his 
physicians; the gala performance at the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


231 


opera in honor of the Czar's visit to London . 
when the mob hoots at the Regent and 
cheers the wronged Queen; the death of 
the frozen soldiers on the Russian plains; 
the ball before Waterloo; the scene in the 
woman's camp behind the English army 
during the progress of the last great battle. 
There is but one strange omission from this 
great panorama of life, and that omission 
the student of literature must always re- 
gret. Statesmen, soldiers, lawyers, phy- 
sicians, men and women of all classes of 
society find their place here, except the 
world of letters; and one cannot but re- 
member that in the years between 1812 and 
1815 there was one Englishman who held 
the attention of Europe to a degree that 
rivalled that bestowed on Napoleon. That 
man was of course Byron — and he is never 
mentioned. Except for this all life sweeps 
by us. We have used the word "pano- 
rama" — it is Hardy's own modest term — - 
but there is detail and order and grasp and 
unity such as no panorama could give. 
The Dynasts is an epic-drama of humanity 
— of humanity in its grandeur and its hu- 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



232 


THOMAS HARDY 


The inter- 
pretation of 
Napoleon's 
character 


mility. In reading it one is constantly re- 
minded of the great sentence in Sartor 
Resartus: "Thus, Hke some wild-flaming, 
wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artil- 
lery, does this mysterious Mankind thun- 
der and flame, in long-drawn, quick-suc- 
ceeding grandeur, through the unknown 
Deep." And of that other sentence: 
"Napoleon, too, and his Moscow Retreats 
and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all 
other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which 
has now, with its howling tumult that 
made night hideous, flitted away?" 

It would be interesting, were there room 
in this brief study, to consider in some 
detail Hardy's interpretation of Napoleon, 
and to compare his portrayal of the Em- 
peror with that of other poet§^ One can 
but offer a few suggestions. The closest 
analogy to Hardy's portrait is that in 
Meredith's Ode "Napoleon." It seems 
likely that Hardy had studied it with care. 
Meredith's analysis is not more subtle 
though it is decidedly less lucid. Sec- 
tions nine and ten of the Ode deal with the 
relations of Napoleon and France: his love 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


233 


for her, ''more than Httle, less than much," 
as the tempered weapon with which he 
hewed through all impediments; the lim- 
itations of his ambitions; the pettiness and 
selfishness behind the grandeur and un- 
scrupulousness. Hardy's own view of him 
is summed up in the magnificent last 
soliloquy of the Emperor after Waterloo, 
which is too long to quote entire and from 
which excerpts could not be made without 
doing injury to the impression made by the 
entire speech. A comparison might also 
be made with Lord De Tabley's fine 
and too-little-known Ode "Napoleon the 
Great" which presents a similar analysis 
and which in like fashion contrasts the 
deeds of the Emperor, world-shaking yet 
transient, with the quiet and enduring 
English country-side. It may not be amiss 
to say that the present writer has received 
statements from more than one specialist 
in the field of Napoleonic research en- 
dorsing completely the historical accuracy 
and psychological insight of Hardy's pic- 
ture of the Emperor. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



234 



The Spirit- 
Intelli- 
gences 



THOMAS HARDY 



in 



The historical or chronicle play is, as it 
were, a play-within-the-play, for the hu- 
man action is watched over by a crowd of 
great Intelligences that range above this 
mortal state and that embody the various 
possible attitudes of the mind towards life 
— ^the passionless wisdom of the ages, the 
cynicism of despair, the fluctuating ner- 
vous pity of the human heart. To these 
spirits is given the function of providing 
the essential comment upon life, upon man, 
and upon the Power that moves mankind 
and the natural world alike; and in their 
elaborate massive debates Hardy has set 
forth his ripest views of the world and has 
accomplished his grandest poetry. They 
are spectators above the smoke and stir 
of this dim spot called earth and from their 
place of vantage are able to magnify seem- 
ingly small matters to the size warranted 
by their significance to mankind, and to 
minimize great events to the pettiness they 
assume when measured by infinity. They 
move with the swiftness of thought from 
place to place; mists, cloud-curtains, rain, 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



and darkness shut off the human tragedy 
as the scenes close. 

The language of The Dynasts has not re- 
ceived the general praise accorded to the 
strength and vividness of its imaginative 
presentation of the action. It varies from 
scene to scene, becoming conscientious and 
plodding when the action drags, rising to 
majestic heights when the subject inspires 
it. Of what great poem may not this be 
said? As one would expect from a perusal 
of the novels, the dialogue in the soldier 
and peasant scenes is uniformly racy and 
realistic. There is a swift and confident 
control of the vernacular in all the scenes 
of low life; there is a less certain mastery 
of society-talk. The parliamentary de- 
bates, military orders and proclamations, 
and diplomatic documents are tedious only 
because the original archives from which 
they are transcribed with just so much 
change as was necessary to put them into 
verse-form are tedious also. But over and 
over again the language is not only ade- 
quate (an adjective that damns with faint 
praise) but transcendently fine, the utter- 



235 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



Language 



III 



236 


THOMAS HARDY 




ance exhibiting that perfect sensing of a 
situation which Watts-Dunton called "ab- 
solute vision." One of the many excellent 
instances of this is a passage drawn from 
the scene on the Victory where Nelson lies 
dying: 

Nelson {suddenly): What are you think- 
ing that you speak no word? 

Hardy {waking from a short reverie): 

Thoughts all confused, my lord:— 

their needs on deck, 
Your own sad state, and your un- 
rivalled past; 
Mixed up with flashes of old things 

afar — 
Old childish things at home, down 

Wessex way, 
In the snug village under Blackdon 

Hill 
Where I was bom. The tumbling 

stream, the garden, 
The placid look of the grey dial there, 
Marking unconsciously this bloody 

hour, 
And the red apples on my father's 

trees, 
Just now full ripe. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


237 


Here there is the same feeling that we have 
already noted so often, of the close inter- 
connection of all human things, the hum- 
blest with the greatest, Trafalgar with 
Blackdon Hill. 

Or note the Dantesque directness, 
mingled with simplicity and power, of the 
report of a Russian soldier to his general 
concerning the French soldiers found dead 
around an extinguished camp-fire: 

They all sit 
As they were living still, but stiff as 

horns; 
And even the colour has not left their 

cheeks, 
Whereon the tears remain in strings of 

ice. — 
It was a marvel they were not consumed : 
Their clothes are cindered by the fire in 

front, 
While at their backs the frost has caked 

them hard. 

Or consider, finally, these indescribably 
solemn words of the Spirit of the Years to 
Napoleon after Waterloo : 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



238 



Lyrics and 
choruses 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



Worthless these kneadings of thy narrow 

thought, 
Napoleon; gone thy opportunity! 
Such men as thou, who wade across the 

world 
To make an epoch, bless, confuse, appal, 
Are in the elemental ages' chart 
Like meanest insects on obscurest leaves 
But incidents and grooves of Earth's 

unfolding; 
Or as the brazen rod that stirs the fire 
Because it must. 

There are charming lyrics in The Dy- 
nasts: ''Budmouth Dears" and *'My 
Love's Gone A-fighting," for example, or 
the song that closes the Trafalgar act. They 
are redolent of the war-spirit of a people, 
stressing emotion rather th^p. thought. 
Some of them have been set to music. 
And many of the spirit-choruses are 
Hardy's highest performances in verse. It 
is impossible to name them all here, but 
one may recall the Albuera chorus in which 
the terror and pity and splendour of fiery 
gallantry are chanted; and the chorus (a 
rondeau — a new use for this old and in 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


239 


other poets' hands trivial form of verse) 
beginning ''The skies fling flame on this 
ancient land"; and the Hymn of the 
Pities in the After-Scene; and the chorus 
before Waterloo — perhaps the most won- 
derful thing in the whole drama — begin- 
ning "The eyelids of eve fall together at 
last" — in which is voiced once more the 
close relationship of all things, the coneys 
and moles and wonns and snails having 
their share in the sufferings that are about 
to fall upon the armies of France and of the 
allies. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



240 


THOMAS HARDY 


Man's 
place in the 
universe 


VII 

"A TENTATIVE METAPHYSIC" 

Man, in Hardy's novels and poems, be- 
comes only one of the many phenomena of 
interest to the imaginative interpreter of 
life. The old anthropocentricity is gone. 
In a sonnet on the Matterhom he muses 
upon the defiance with which the granite 
block has withstood the onset of centuries 
while events of tremendous import for poor 
humanity have had their day and ceased 
to be. 

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and 

soon 
Thou didst behold the planets lift and 

lower; 
Saw'st, maybe, Joshua's pausing sun and 

moon, 
And the betokening sky when Caesar's 

power 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Approached its bloody end; yea, even 

that Noon 
When darkness filled the earth till the 

ninth hour. 

By implication this contrast is impressively 
set forth at the close of A Group of Noble 
Dames when, the stories all told and the 
club members departed to their homes, 
darkness reigns over the room in the mu- 
seum where they had met: 

The curator locked up the rooms, and 
soon there was only a single pirouetting 
flame on the top of a single coal to make 
the bones of the ichthyosaurus seem to 
leap, the stuffed birds to wink, and to 
draw a smile from the varnished skulls of 
Vespasian's soldiery. 

So also in the otherwise nearly negligible 
novel Two on a Tower the feverishness of 
human passion is set impressively against 
a background of starry distances. Says 
the young astronomer to his mistress: 

"The actual sky is a horror. . . . 
You would hardly think, at first, that 



241 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



242 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



jjOrrid monsters lie up there waiting to 
e discovered. . . . Monsters to which 
those of the oceans bear no sort of com- 
parison. . . . Impersonal monsters, 
namely, Immensities. Until a person 
has thought out the stars and their in- 
terspaces, he has hardly learnt that there 
are things much more terrible than mon- 
sters of shape, namely, monsters of mag 
nitude without known shape. Such 
monsters are the voids and waste places 
of the sky." 

Swithin's very words find echoes in one 
of the great discourses of the Spirit of the 
Years in The Dynasts. 

A meditation upon a lunar eclipse takes 
the form of contrasting the petty preten- 
tiousness of our concerns — 

Nation at war with nation, brains that 

teem, 
Heroes, and women fairer than the 

skies — 

with the imperturbable serenity of the seg- 
ment of shadow cast upon the moon, that 
sole stellar gauge of the real worth of 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


243 


''Heaven's high human scheme." "A 
thousand years in Thy sight" — so Hardy 
seems to address the Will — "are but as 
yesterday." The monsters of the eocene 
become companions of man. The Napo- 
leonic Wars dwindle in that scale to micro- 
scopic insignificance. In the After-Scene 
of The Dynasts the Spirit of the Years ut- 
ters the necessary comment : 

Yet but one flimsy riband of Its web 
Have we here watched in weaving — web 

Enorme, 
Whose furthest hem and selvage may ex- 
tend 
To where the roars and plashings of the 

flames 
Of earth-invisible suns swell noisil}^, 
And onwards into ghastly gulfs of sky, 
Where hideous presences churn through 

the dark — 
Monsters of magnitude without a shape, 
Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness. 

Thus viewed, Christianity becomes "a 
local thing" 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



244 


THOMAS HARDY 




Beyond whose span, uninfluenced, un- 
concerned, 

The systems of the suns go sweeping on 

With all their many-mortaled planet 
train 

In mathematic roll unceasingly. 

Men — ^whole nations — are moved like fig- 
ures on a lantern-slide, drawn to and fro 
by the halyards of the all-pervading Will, 
the intertwisted strands of which are re- 
vealed in certain scenes of The Dynasts to 
the on-looking Intelligences. And the 
grandest phenomena of Nature, though 
they reduce to insignificance the wildest 
turmoil of humanity, are no more free. In 
the poem called ''The Subalterns" the 
leaden sky, the North wind, disease and 
death, disclaim responsibility for the func- 
tions which they are compelled to perforin. 
Some few men, Napoleon among them, 
discern the workings of the Will that har- 
ries them on, fulfilling or baffling that 
which they imagine to be their own pur- 
poses. Yet in the act of planning they are 
as much under compulsion as in outward 
action. The Power that moves the uni- 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



verse is shadowed forth under a variety of 
august names: The High Influence, the 
Eternal Urger, the Rapt Determinator, the 
Immanent Unreckoning, the Great Fore- 
sightless, the Unconscious. As in the 
scheme of things adumbrated by Schopen- 
hauer, phenomena, in all their multiplicity, 
are but the appearances which hide the one 
reality, the Will. It is to this Primal 
Force that in the final analysis all the 
shows of the world reduce themselves; 
Man is but the highest expression of It. 
In lines that have already become famous 
Hardy describes the way in which It 
works : 

Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ 

of Being, 
Nothing appears of shape to indicate 
That cognizance has marshalled things 

terrene, 
Or will (such is my thinking) in my .span. 
Rather they show that, like a knitter 

drowsed, 
Whose fingers play in skilled unmindful- 

ness, 



245 



The Primal 
Force 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



246 



Colloquies 
with God 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



The Will has woven with an absent heed 
Since life first was; and ever will so 
weave. 

So speaks the Spirit of the Years, repre- 
sentative of the insight and experience of 
the ages. A number of the shorter poems 
are concerned with cosmic questionings, 
some of them in the form of colloquies with 
God in which, with a boldness that sug- 
gests the work of Mr. James Stephens and 
other younger poets, Hardy presents an 
indictment of the faith in an anthropo- 
morphic deity. Perhaps some primeval 
disaster cleft the original scheme of things 
apart. Perhaps the Will's "mindlessness 
of earthly woes " may be due to. Its interest 
in other worlds, being wearied out with the 
ceaseless turmoil of earth. Perhaps the 
Godhead is dying downward, heart and 
brain all gone save for the last flicker of 
consciousness that abides in man. Or 
maybe man's consciousness is a foretoken 
of coming consciousness directing all 
things everywhere. 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 



Men gained cognition with the flux of 

time. 
And wherefore not the Force informing 

them? 

Through some accident that rests unex- 
plained mankind, ''emerging with blind 
gropes from impercepience by listless se- 
quence," has achieved consciousness and a 
moral sense. 

Our incorporeal sense, 
Our overseeings, our supernal state, 
Our readings Why and Whence, 
Are but the flower of Man's intelligence; 
And that but an unreckoned incident 
Of the all-urging Will, raptly magni- 
potent. 

A sentence towards the end of Jiide the 
Obscure anticipates precisely and suc- 
cinctly the philosophy of The Dynasts: 

Vague and quaint imaginings had 
haunted Sue . . . that the world re- 
sembled a stanza or melody composed in 
a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to 
the half-aroused intelligence, but hope- 



247 



AND MONOGRAPHS 



III 



248 


THOMAS HARDY 




lessly absurd at the full waking; that the 
First Cause worked automatically like a 
somnambulist, and not reflectively like a 
sage; that at the framing of the terres- 
trial conditions there seemed never to 
have been contemplated such a devel- 
opment of emotional perceptiveness 
among the creatures subject to those 
conditions as that reached by thinking 
and educated humanity. 

The little poem called ''In a Wood" con- 
tains the very crux of Hardy's tentative 
metaphysic. It recites such evidences of 
strangled aspiration, thwarted desire and 
blind conflict as those noted also in The 
Woodlanders: gnarled trunks, twisted 
branches, stunted growths, and bare and 
blighted ground (for Hardy n6yer errs, as 
does Dickens, by imputing his own kindli- 
ness to the scheme of things). These evi- 
dences lead the poet to this c9nclusion: 

Since, then, no grace I find 

Taught me of trees. 
Turn I back to my kind, 

Worthy as these. 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


249 


There at least smiles abound, 
There discourse trills around, 
There, now and then, are found 
Life-loyalties. 

Captious critics always note Hardy's in- 
consistency in ascribing to a purposeless 
and conscienceless Will the creation of 
beings in whom purpose and conscience 
have been evolved. But those critics are 
in error who accuse him of unawareness of 
this inconsistency. On the contrary he 
returns again and again to meditations 
upon "the intolerable antilogy of making 
figments feel." 

How the faculty of reason came about is 
inexplicable; b;it it exists. Henceforth, 
for good or ill, two natures contend within 
man's bosom. For Hardy falls short of 
complete acceptance of the materialistic 
monism which he so often aflfinns. In 
humankind there is a struggle between in- 
tuition, the Will-to-Live, which is in ac- 
cord with the blind Immanence that exists 
only for the sake of existing, and intellect, 
the Will-Not-to-Live, which knows that 


Dualism 


AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



250 


THOMAS HARDY 


The uncon- 
querable 
hope 


existence is not worth prolonging. We 
have found this doctrine expressed in al- 
most allegorical form in Jude the Obscure. 
The connection with von Hartmann's 
Philosophy of the Unconscious is obvious. 
In the rivalry between Being and Not- 
Being the Will is still in control, but the 
power of Reason is growing and will one 
day prevail. Then the problem will be 
solved by a voluntary lapse into uncon- 
sciousness. Man will be healed of the 
wound of living. 

Were this Hardy's final word his would 
indeed be ''a twilight view of life." What 
more may be said? Can any contradiction 
to this view be found in his writings? 
Little at best, and that, little must be 
weighed against the many evidences of re- 
volt and despair. But at least he seems 
to hesitate upon the brink, and with a 
sacrifice of logic introduces among the 
crashing chords of his pessimism a note of 
hope. What if his view of life be the re- 
sult of limited vision? ''The Darkling 
Thrush," that beautiful poem, describes a 
gaunt, wintry country-side from amidst 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIvST 


251 


which in the gathering gloom there bursts 
forth the full-hearted even-song of a bird : 

So little cause for carollings 

Of such ecstatic sound 
Was written on terrestrial things 

Afar or nigh around, 
That I could think there trembled 
through 

His happy good-night air 
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 

And I was unaware. 

And even if his interpretation of life is 
sound? Hope still resides in the possibil- 
ity that the process that has led life up from 
the primal ooze to man may be yet func- 
tioning so that in the far future a conscious 
sympathy may form a link between the 
Will and Its creatures. The awakening of 
consciousness, w^hich seems the bitterest 
whim of the Will — may that not be the first 
stirrings in man of a power for good that 
will one day permeate the vast framework 
of things? 

By some still close-cowled mystery 
We have reached feeling faster than he, 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



252 


THOMAS HARDY 


V 


But he will overtake us anon, 
If the world goes on. 

So Hardy writes in a recently published 
"Fragment"; and it is noteworthy that 
the masculine pronoun is restored in this 
allusion to the Fundamental Energy. Else- 
where he expresses his awareness of 

That enkindling ardency from whose 

maturer glows 
The world's amendment flows. 

And elsewhere still, in one of his grandest 
poems, the poet who has so often shaped 
weak phantasies of the blind and dumb 
Wilier raises his voice in praise because 
here and there old wrongs are dying out. 
Is there no hopefulness in this? Can it be 
that a "ripening rule" will transcend the 
"ancient rote-restricted ways," 

That listless effort tends 
To grow percipient with advance of days. 
And with percipience mends? 

No concession to the wishes of the novel- 
reading public, such as suggested the 
"happy ending" of The Return of the 


III 


BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


253 


Native, compelled Hardy to close The Dy- 
nasts as he did. It is of the utmost sig- 
nificance that the last word is given, not to 
the Spirit Sinister (the exponent of a cy- 
nical pessimism) nor to the Spirit of the 
Years (who interprets the events of the 
human tragedy in accordance with a strict 
determinism), but to the Spirit of the 
Pities, the symbol of human sympathy and 
of the undying fire, the unconquerable hope 
of humanity. If the evils suffered by those 
whom the Will quickens can be neither 
curbed nor cured (so the final chorus sings), 
then let the Will darken swiftly to extinc- 
tion. But the chorus ends otherwise: 

But — a stirring thrills the air 
Like to sounds of joyance there 
That the rages 
Of the ages 
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance of- 
fered from the darts chat were. 
Consciousness the Will informing, till It 
fashion all things fair. 

The events of the Great War might have 
been employed by this sombre thinker as 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



254 



THOA/[AS HARDY 



III 



unqualified illustrations of the truth of a 
deterministic philosophy; and indeed, as 
we have seen, he attaches the blame to no 
man but rather to ''the Immanent Doer 
That does not know." But again the final 
word has hope in it, for the Thing respon- 
sible for the dire crash 

. . . in some age unguessed of us 
May lift Its blinding incubus, 

And see, and own: 
"It grieves me I did thus and thus." 

And the "Men who march away" are up- 
held by the faith within them that "Vic- 
tory crowns the just." Hardy's grandest 
gift is that "double vision" of which one 
of his best critics has spoken, whereby, 
while seeing life as trivial and futile, he 
can see it also as heroically sublime. The 
universe is not hopeless of betterment that 
has produced the sort of men to whom 
Hardy gives his meed of praise — and that 
has produced the sympathy and tenderness 
with which he cries, not to Tess only but 
to all humanity, "Poor wounded name, my 
bosom as a bed shall lodge thee!" 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


255 


NOTES 

1 At a meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club 
in July, 1895, Meredith and Hardy were both 
present and each made interesting reference 
to this early association. Hardy described 
his rejected first story as "very wild," where- 
upon Meredith called out: "Promising!" 
See S. M. Ellis: George Meredith (1920), p. 
209. 

2 See J. W. Cunliffe: English Literature Dur- 
ing the Last Half Century (1919), p. 40. In- 
formation kindly supplied me by Mrs. Thomas 
Hardy enables me to contradict this, as also 
to state that the manuscript of this first novel 
is still in existence. 

3 See the letter from Hardy to Tinsley, 
dated from Bockhampton, December 20, 
1870, which is reproduced in facsimile in A. 
Edward Newton's Amenities of Book-Collect- 
ing (1918), p. 12. 

* See H. C. Duffin: Thomas Hardy (1916), 
p. 3. 

^ Note especially the morbid episode of 
Miss Aldclyffe's visit to Cytherea's room at 
night (pp. 88-97 of the Wessex edition). 

« For a well-reasoned contrast between 
Hardy and George Eliot see F. A. Hedgcock: 
Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste (1910), pp. 
338 f. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



256 



III 



THOMAS HARDY 



7 See Harold Child: Thomas Hardy (1916), 
pp. 53 f. 

8 See Hermann Lea: Thomas Hardy's Wes- 
sex (1913), p. 171. 

9 See especially The Spectator, No. 55, 1882. 

10 Will it be believed that Mr. Duffin (op. 
cit., p. 130) interprets this as meaning "the 
desire for knowledge, or (specially) for aca- 
demic distinction"? In reviewing Mr. Duf- 
fin's book {Modern Language Notes, Decem- 
ber, 1 9 1 6, p. 5 1 2) the present writer remarked : 
"At least one aspirant towards knowledge — 
and one not altogether unconscious of the 
last infirmity of professorial minds — envies 
the academic repose, 'calm, sad, secure, be- 
hind high convent walls,' evinced by this gloss 
upon Mr. Hardy's text." 

11 In a letter on "Dialect in Novels" (The 
Athenaeum, November 30, 1878, p. 688). 

12 In the autumn of 1 920 the Dorchester 
Debating and Dramatic Society produced a 
dramatic version of The Return of the Native, 
adapted by Mr. T. H. Tilley from the novel. 
According to the newspaper account of this 
production the most interesting thing in the 
play proved to be the "Masque of St. 
George." "As regards words and costumes 
it is a perfect cameo of the rustic folk-play as 
performed in most English villages at Christ- 
mastide a hundred years ago." 

13 See The Athenaeum, December 3, 1920, 
p. 771. 

1* See Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vi, 
403. 



BRYN MAWR NOTES 



POET AND NOVELIST 


257 


^5 See Church Folk-Lore, second edition, p. 
146. 

^® For example, in Webster's The Duchess of 
Malfi; Middleton's The Witch; Fletcher's 
The Custom of the Country; Dekker's The 
Whore of Babylon (here the image is buried 
that it may rot in the ground) ; and Shirley's 
The Traitor. 

1^ The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, 
Section 2, Mem. iii. Sub-section 5. 




AND MONOGRAPHS 


III 



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